Fetishizing the Zapatistas: a critique of "Change the World Without Taking Power"

Louis Proyect
June 7, 2003

Louis Proyect is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list and marxist writer, blogging as "The Unrepentant Marxist".

As should be clear to even the most casual observer on the left, the Chiapas rebellion has become as much of a paradigm for the post-Marxist left as October 1917 was for an earlier generation of Marxists. The collapse of the USSR, the difficulties faced by socialist Cuba and an ostensibly brand-new way of doing politics in Chiapas put wind in the sails of ideological currents that never were committed to classical Marxism to begin with, including the autonomist and anarchist movements. In contrast to the anarchists, autonomism has positioned itself as retaining the emancipatory core of Marxism, while disposing of the dross. This is one of the central messages of John Holloway's "To Change the World Without Taking Power". We will assess this claim in due time, but first some background on the Zapatista left in general and how it took shape.

Although the Chiapas revolt grew out of Mayan resentment over unemployment, land hunger, racism and other injustices that face indigenous peoples everywhere in the world, it transformed itself very rapidly into a global movement that at time appeared as spokes radiating from Subcommandante Marcos's laptop, just as an earlier generation rotated around the Kremlin.

The Zapatistas became hosts of a series of 'encuentros' (encounters) in Mexico and elsewhere, the first of which was held in Chiapas in August 1996, two and a half years after the start of their revolt. Some 3,000 guests from 43 different countries came together as part of an International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity to discuss how to "change the world".

With the armed revolt at an end, the EZLN had begun to explore nonviolent options. According to the August 5, 1996 Guardian, some high profile guests including Danielle Mitterrand (the wife of the French social democratic leader), Eduardo Galeano and Douglas Bravo were encouraged by this transition. Bravo was himself a former guerrilla fighter in Venezuela during the 1960s but became committed to a kind of "civil society" reformism that eventually led him to join the opposition to Hugo Chavez.

When asked what he expected from the gathering, Subcommandante Marcos said: "I haven't a damn clue." This led French intellectual Regis Debray to comment. "This is a return to the essential resistance." Debray, like Bravo, was once part of the foquismo left in Latin America but in more recent years has become part of the French cultural establishment, serving for a time as adviser to President Mitterand whose wife shared Debray's enthusiasms for heterodox leftisms.

These encuentros had a tremendously energizing effect on the post-Marxist left in the same way that Comintern conferences in the early 1920s had on people like John Reed. Unlike the Comintern, these gatherings adopted the discourse of the anti-globalization movement. Instead of hearing Bukharin presenting an analysis of the latest stage of imperialism, the delegations focused on 'neoliberalism', privatization and other symptoms of the underlying capitalist crisis. The search for solutions in Chiapas stopped short of obviously passé measures such as socialist revolution.

Even though the imagination-challenged Marxist movement tended to shy away from these gatherings, as early as the second--held in Spain in 1996--some stodgy participants were beginning to get impatient and think in terms of goals, even though this was the last thing on Subcommandante's mind. As Gustavo Esteva writes in the collection "Auroras of the Zapatistas" (Midnight Notes, 2001), a tension arose between those "who fully enjoyed the opportunity to meet and share with others" and those who sought "a manifesto, an organization, a political platform…"

By 1998, the encuentros began to shift perceptibly toward becoming the anti-globalization movement of today (well, perhaps not post 9/11, but of a couple of years ago at least). Yale Professor David Graeber, who has become a highly visible opponent of Marxism and defender of this new way of doing politics (or rather not doing politics), claims that this movement was born in Barcelona that year:

"The real origins of the movement, for example, lie in an international network called People's Global Action (PGA). PGA emerged from a 1998 Zapatista encuentro in Barcelona, and its founding members include not only anarchist groups in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist peasant league in India, the Argentinian teachers' union, indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian landless peasants movement and a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America."

http://flag.blackened.net/pipermail/infoshop-news/2001-November/000276.html

One year later the Seattle protests erupted and the world's attention became riveted on this new movement that apparently had its origins in Chiapas, Mexico. While some of the popularizers of this new movement put their message across in the mass media, a significant number were based in academia. At the University of Texas, Harry Cleaver synthesized autonomist Marxism and fashionable ideas about the power of the Internet in order to advance the idea that Subcommandante Marcos's laptop represented something entirely new. He writes:

"The rhizomatic pattern of collaboration has emerged as a partial solution to the failure of old organizational forms; it has --by definition-- no single formula to guide the kinds of elaboration required. The power of The Net in the Zapatista struggle has lain in connection and circulation, in the way widely dispersed nodes of antagonism set themselves in motion in response to the uprising in Chiapas."

While it would be foolish to underestimate the power of the Internet, one might plausibly raise the question of whether technical-organizational dichotomies between hierarchies and networks get to the heart of the challenges facing the left. As we move into a period of deepening social and economic crisis punctuated by brutal imperialist adventures, the Internet will eventually become part of the political landscape just as the mimeograph was in years past. But technology can be no substitute for a careful assessment of the relationship of class forces on the ground and intelligent strategies and tactics based on that analysis.

A balance sheet on the progress made by the EZLN in overcoming historic injustices to the Mayan people must be made on the basis of tangible gains. It is doubtful whether the Internet can ever serve as a panacea for problems that nag away at the Mexican left, Chiapas included. While the telephone and mimeograph machine undoubtedly did a lot to empower the trade union and social movements in the USA, it was ultimately strategy and tactics that determined the outcome.

Turning now to John Holloway's "To Change the World Without Taking Power", we enter a terrain where such mundane matters seem to matter little. Taking Subcommandante Marcos's refusal to specify goals or the methods necessary to achieve them as a starting point, Holloway has written a book that effectively inflates the Zapatista style of politics into a post-Marxist Communist Manifesto.

For narrow-minded technicians like myself who like to keep databases of such things, this is now the third new communist manifesto to occupy a place on my bookshelf alongside Hardt-Negri's "Empire" (Zizek, "Nothing less than a rewriting of the Communist Manifesto for our time") and Guattari-Negri's "Communists Like Us" which purports modestly to "rescue 'communism' from its own disrepute."

At first blush, all of these books seem driven by the need to proceed directly to something called communism without passing go. All the sordid business associated with what Bukharin called "the transition period" will somehow be leapfrogged by a monumental act of will, especially the bugbear of the autonomist movement: the state.

In chapter two (Beyond the State), Holloway argues that it doesn't do any good for working people to create their own state: "If the state paradigm was the vehicle of hope for much of the century, it became more and more the assassin of hope as the century progressed." Correctly observing that China and Russia failed to "promote the reign of freedom", Holloway manages to avoid any reference to Cuba. Since Cuba defies any easy pigeonholing as a totalitarian dungeon, it tends to be swept under the rug in autonomist literature.

Holloway explains that Marxist assumptions about transforming society fail to take into account that "capitalist social relations, by their nature, have always gone beyond territorial limitations". So, it becomes an exercise in futility to smash the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state of the kind conceived by Lenin in "State and Revolution" for to do so would simply re-introduce oppressive power relations, especially those refracted through a nominally socialist society's ties to the outside capitalist world. Or, as the Who once put it in "Won't Get Fooled Again":

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

Holloway expresses the same sentiments in a more polished manner: "You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost."

Far be it for me to even suggest that something as passé as Marxist dialectics can still have some value, it would appear to me that speaking in terms of power versus non-power cedes too much to formal logic. While it is true that a woman cannot be pregnant and not pregnant at the same time, certain social phenomena have contradictory aspects. For example, when Father Gapon organized a demonstration to present a petition to the Czar, some 200,000 St Petersburg workers marched behind him with pictures of the Tsar, religious icons and church banners. Instead of dismissing this as a genuflection before Czarism, Trotsky saw the other side of the process: "Gapon did not create the revolutionary energy of the workers of St Petersburg, he merely released it and events completely overtook him."

Oddly enough, despite a tendency toward cryptic formulations, Subcommandante Marcos himself can be quite specific on the value of power:

"When we governed, we lowered to zero the rate of alcoholism, and the women here became very fierce and they said that drink only served to make the men beat their women and children, and to act barbarically, and therefore they gave the order that no drink was allowed, and that we could not allow drinking to go on, and the people who received the most benefit were the children and women, and the ones most damaged were the businessmen and the government...

"The destruction of trees also was prohibited, and laws were made to protect the forests, and the hunting of wild animals was prohibited, even if they were from the government, and the cultivation, consumption and trafficking in drugs were prohibited, and these laws were upheld. The infant death rate went way down, and became very small, just like the children are. And the Zapatista laws were applied uniformly, without regard for social position or income level. And we made all of the major decisions, or the 'strategic' ones, of our struggle, by means of a method that they call the 'referendum' and the 'plebiscite'. And we got rid of prostitution and unemployment disappeared as well as begging. The children had sweets and toys. And we made many errors and had many failures. And we also accomplished what no other government in the world, regardless of its political affiliation, is capable of doing honestly, and that is to recognize its errors and to take steps to remedy them."

Full: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/marcos_one_year.html

In a certain sense, attempts to seize power and transform all of society along the lines described by the Subcommandante are doomed to failure unless humanity overcomes something called "fetishization" which functions in Holloway's schema as a kind of tragic flaw, like Oedipus's pride or Dr. Frankenstein's mad desire to create life from the parts of dead bodies.

As most people are probably aware, fetish is a term that has its origins in anthropology. It is a charm or amulet that has magical powers for so-called primitive peoples. It is etymologically related to the word factitious, which means artificial. Freud and other experts on abnormal psychology have used the word to describe sexual attachments to objects like shoes and other garments. For example, according to the tell-all memoir of his mistress, President Salinas of Mexico had an Imelda Marcos-like fetish for charro suits, the silver-buckled outfits and matching sombrero, boots and spurs worn by mariachi singers. She reported that over 70 were hidden away in his closet.

Holloway uses the term in its Marxist sense, which he describes as a "central category" in Capital even though "it is almost completely ignored by those who regard themselves as Marxist economists". As understood by Marx and by Holloway as well, it is tied up with alienation, especially that between the worker and the commodity he or she produces. He sees fetishization as the main target for those who would change the world: "Any thought or practice which aims at the emancipation of humanity from the dehumanization of capitalism is necessarily directed against fetishism." But Holloway takes Marx one step further. It is not simply the separation between worker and commodity; it is also by extension the separation between doing and done, and between subject and object. Thus, what begins as an attempt grounded in political economy to elucidate how capitalism appears to the ruled as a permanent system shades off into a kind of philosophical critique of Cartesian dualism:

"Constitution and existence are sundered. The constituted denies the constituting, the done the doing, the object the subject. The object constituted acquires a durable identity. It becomes an apparently autonomous structure. This sundering (both real and apparent) is crucial to the stability of capitalism. The statement that 'that's the way things are' presupposes that separation. The separation of constitution and existence is the closure of radical alternatives."

Leaving aside the question of how to translate this sort of thing into a punchy leaflet that will grab the attention of the average worker, it does not really convey what Marx was all about in philosophical terms. As a materialist, Marx saw human beings as part of the physical universe: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature." (German Ideology)

Within this context, ideas arise from social relationships: "The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour." (German Ideology)

While expressed in somewhat different terms than Holloway's heterodox views on "fetishization", the notion ideas arising from material conditions conveys much more accurately Marx's understanding of the relationship between humanity, ideology and class society. Historical and material conditions govern the way we think. In order to become free human beings unconstrained by bourgeois ideology, it is necessary to abolish commodity production, which is the substratum of bourgeois society. Struggles against "fetishism" are rather futile as long as commodity production is generalized throughout society.

For Marx, the only way to overcome alienation (and fetishism, by implication) is to change material conditions:

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones." (German Ideology; emphasis added)

This is the reason that Marxists have historically targeted the state. In order to achieve a classless society, it is necessary to develop the productive forces to such a high degree that competition for goods becomes more and more unnecessary. As leisure time and the general level of culture increases, human beings will enjoy a level of freedom that has never been attainable in class society.

For a variety of reasons, socialist revolutions have occurred in backward countries where the development of productive forces has been hampered by a number of factors, including imperialist blockade, technological and industrial underdevelopment, low productivity of labor and the need to stave off invasions and subversion--in other words, the kinds of conditions that make a country like Cuba fall short of communist ideals. Notwithstanding Cuba's difficulties, the revolution has made a significant impact on peoples' lives, so much so that it earned the praise of James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, in May of 2001: "Cuba has done a great job on education and health and if you judge the country by education and health they've done a terrific job."

Wolfensohn was simply recognizing the reality of statistics in the bank's World Development Indicators report that showed Cubans living longer than other Latin Americans, including residents of the US Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Literacy levels were on a par with Uruguay, while the life expectancy rate was 76 years, second only to Costa Rica at 77. Infant mortality in Cuba was seven deaths per 1,000 live births, much lower than the rest of Latin America.

While it is true that Cuba is enmeshed in a myriad of ways within the world capitalist economy, it did withdrew from the World Bank and its sister lending agency, the International Monetary Fund, in 1959. Despite the collapse of the USSR and continuing efforts to destroy the country economically by the USA, Cuba continues to develop its productive capabilities and raise the cultural level of the people.

Turning to Chiapas, the general picture is far less encouraging. In a February 3, 2003 Newsday article titled "Infant Deaths Plague Mexico", we learn that the Comitan hospital serves nearly 500,000 people in Chiapas. Burdened by inadequate staffing and supplies, babies die at twice the national rate. Meanwhile, the February 21, 2001 Financial Times reported on a study conducted by the Association for the Health of Indigenous Children in Mexico in the village of Las Canadas, Chiapas. It found that not one girl had adequate nutritional levels compared with 39.4 per cent of boys. Female malnutrition has actually led to physical shrinking over the last decade from an average height of 1.42 meters to 1.32 meters. At the same time, more than half of women who speak an indigenous language are illiterate - five times the national average.

While nobody can blame the EZLN for failing to make a revolution in Mexico, we would be remiss if we did not point out the obvious material differences between the two societies, especially in the countryside where poverty has traditionally been extreme. With its abundant natural resources, including oil and fertile farmland, it is not too difficult to imagine how much of a difference a socialist Mexico would have made in the lives of the poor.

For John Holloway, access to decent medical care seems far less important than "visibility", a term that he sees as practically defining Zapatismo and presumably missing altogether in dreary Cuban state socialism. This is expressed through the balaclava, the mask that Subcommandante wore at press conferences and which has since been appropriated by Black Block activists breaking Starbucks windows in the name of anti-capitalism: "The struggle for visibility is also central to the current indigenous movement, expressed most forcefully in the Zapatista wearing of the balaclava: we cover our face so that we can be seen, our struggle is the struggle of those without face."

While every movement certainly needs an element of mystique, it is doubtful that the Zapatista movement could sustain itself over the long haul using such symbols. Nor is it likely that it could succeed without linking up to a dynamic, rising mass movement in the rest of Mexico. Localized peasant struggles have a long history in Mexico going back to the 19th century. If you strip away the balaclava and Subcommandante Marcos's laptop, you will find all the elements that ultimately frustrated the efforts of the original Zapata, namely the failure of a regional uprising to become part of a general assault on state power and the social and economic transformation of society.

To fetishize these sorts of incomplete and partial rebellions as a new way of doing politics not only does a disservice to the valiant efforts of the Mayan people, it also creates obstacles to those of us who also want to change the world but on a more favorable basis. For in the final analysis, it requires a democratic and centralized movement of the working class and its allies to take power in a country like Mexico.
Fetishizin

The Limits of Social Movements: An untimely reflection

Marc Saint-Upéry
ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento
November 5, 2004

Marc Saint-Upéry is a French journalist and translator residing in Ecuador . He has translated works of Mike Davis, Amartya Sen, Jeremy Rifkin and Robert Fisk, as well as Michael Moore the Yes Men. He is author of El sueño de Bolívar. El desafío de las izquierdas sudamericanas [Bolivar's Dream: The Challenge of the South American Lefts] (2008).

In the 1950s and 1960s, people in the French left sometimes avoided speaking certain truths (on the Soviet system, for example) so as to “keep hope alive in Billencourt”[1] for the pro-Communist workers. While I do not share this Jesuitical conception of the truth, I offer these very incomplete and imperfect reflections on the limits of the social movements with no intention of denying hope to the militant cadres that work to construct and to fortify these movements. I intend, rather, to oppose the deceptive and unspoken fallacy that underlies a certain enthusiastic movimientismo, that in my opinion is an uncritical exaltation of the social movements, that is often just a cheap substitute for, and only barely disguises, the comfortable and monolithic certainties of Leninist or foquista [guerrilla] vanguardism. This fallacy takes a correct and extremely important premise – "without the social movements, nothing is possible" – and surreptitiously derives from it an invalid conclusion: "with the social movements, everything (or almost everything) is possible."

In calling a debate on the unanswered questions surrounding social movements, I wanted to concentrate on three subjects: the problem of the relation of social movements to politics; the relation between their "demographic" weight and their political weight; and the question of the "antisystemic" character, or the anticapitalist potential, of these movements.

The dilemma of politics
As soon as they take part in the dispute over the common good and the social order, social movements move openly and directly to politics and contribute to the definition of the political agenda. Nevertheless, the relation of the social movements with politics – much less politicians – is not usually understood in the sense of state institutions, public policy and electoral competitions. In the latest debates on social movements in Latin America, there was a certain tendency to presuppose the existence of an emphatic split between social self-organization and political institutions. This absolute dichotomy often reflects a slippery attempt at moralizing the strategic debate, and a new version of old fundamentalist impulses. Nowadays, the question is: just what is the revolution, who are the revolutionaries and the reformists, how best to distinguish the “pure” from the “impure” in order to defend the virginity of idealized social movements against any institutional contamination. The most extreme form of this purism is found in a curious book by John Holloway.[2] However, I believe that Holloway’s thesis is only the hyperbolic crystallization of a vague but insistent ideological mood that other authors offer in more qualified forms.

One of them is Raúl Zibechi, who has published an article on the "dangerous relations" between social movements and state power.[3] For Zibechi, the contrast between the brief and ill-fated governmental participation of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, once powerful and now debilitated by this experience, and the practice of electoral and institutional participation of the Brazilian landless movement MST, verifies that the real alternatives are constructed essentially outside state spaces, in the “stubborn autonomy” of social and community base areas. However, the reality is a little more complex. Like many social movements, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement was built in large part based on the political, institutional and symbolic reserves of the state – as well as those of the para-state or supra-state constituted by the multilateral and international cooperation agencies [non-governmental organizations]. Its real militance, although cyclical, could almost be characterized in the terms used by García Linera Alvaro to describe the old Bolivian labor movement: “a deep-rooted, accusing spirit confronting the state, bellicose certainly, but demarcated within the boundaries of meaning and modernization propagated by the state.”[4] In general, the diagnosis of Pablo Ospina applies: “The [Ecuadorian] Indian movement navigates between various options that interconnect, separate and diverge: to oppose the power of the state, to turn to the power of the state, to create more or less autonomous spaces of power inside the state.”[5] Yet these “separations” and “divergences” hardly ever break out between the spurious professional politicians and the heroic supporters of social mobilization; rather, the ambivalences of its relation with power systematically cut through every instance of a social movement, from the leadership to the base.[6]

At the heart of this mythical dichotomy between political power and social anti-power, there is, in Zibechi’s words, a noticeable confusion between two not necessarily congruent strategic options: a rigorous distancing from market competition and electoral obligations, as is the case with MST; and an actively driven, separate and autonomous institution, like the Zapatista “caracoles” [local government assemblies] (but not with the Ecuadorian indigenous municipalities, which promote participation within the framework of the prevailing legal-administrative order). But the situation on the ground in Chiapas is much more subtle. In a recent document, for example, Subcomandante Marcos, while fully supporting the autonomy and radical democratic practices of the Zapatista Good Government Assemblies, pointed out that they: (a) recognize the penal jurisdiction of the Mexican State; (b) have cooperative relations with many of the official municipalities with which they share territory; (c) maintain a communications channel with the state government of Chiapas through the Secretariat of Indian Peoples; (d) although “they do not think that the elections are in truth a path for the people’s interests,” they recognize the right of the administrators to participate in the official elections and are ready to facilitate the work of the electoral authorities on Zapatista turf.[7]

In addition, after some very stormy attempts, the Zapatista municipalities renounced the imposition of taxes in the territories under their control, to live essentially on international solidarity and cooperation.[8] Zapatista “counterpower” is kept in a curious ambiguity in the face of the coercive and expropriatory prerogatives that traditionally characterize state power. This ambiguity can be interpreted as a weakness, or as a fertile area of institutional innovation. It demonstrates, at least, that reality does not affirm the twofold schemes of the ideologists of counterpower or antipower.

The case of the Zapatistas is very particular for its creation of armed “self-limited” insurrection and its subsequent trajectory. In any context outside of pure coercion or institutional anarchy, the most general problem of social movements is that their essential “internal institutionality,”[9] while original and autonomous in form, cannot overlook “external” institutionality and the problems that it raises: Who holds sovereignty? Who is the legitimate representative? – and so on. The autonomy of social movements from the political-electoral market, especially its corrupt, “for sale to the highest bidder” versions, is indispensable. To believe, all the same, that this autonomy lessens the problems of the struggle for state power, of the contentious formation of the general will, of the institutionalization of the rules of social coexistence and of public deliberation, of the equitable administration of resources, of the representation of citizens and of their active participation in public matters, is the coarsest of illusions.

The contribution of social movements is not in the unilateral promotion of a spontaneous “direct” or “participatory” democracy against a purely “formal” representative democracy. It takes just a minimum of reflection to understand that workers’ democracy, the soviets, the popular assemblies, or any form of democracy with strong participation of the base populations, should not become spaces for turning militants into professional apparatchiks or for plebiscites of acclamation for the great leader. They need to have rigorous rules and delegative and representative mechanisms, simultaneously impartial, transparent and efficient. In other words, they need to be even more “formal” than representative “bourgeois” democracy. Beyond its anthropologic ingenuousness, the fetishization of the “constituent power” in opposition to the “constituted power” – to use Toni Negri's lexicon – demonstrates a complete miscomprehension of, and maybe a certain scorn for, the dynamics of the democratic institution as the social construction of a public space where the rules give rise to conflicts, and conflicts restructure the rules and transform the actors and their interests. The real political challenge of social movements is there, not in the deceitful dilemma between social purity and institutional contamination.

The dilemma of size and scope
Some of the more important and active Latin American social movements are rural movements acting in majority urban societies. It is certain that, despite the furious smear campaigns carried out by the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the media, a movement like the MST has great acceptance in Brazilian opinion. However, we can't confuse popularity with hegemony. The case of the Zapatistas is illustrative.

Are social movements the majority or the minority in society? And if they are the minority, to what extent does this condition their capacity for political and moral leadership in the subaltern sectors? This question, which, at bottom, brings us back to the classic problem of the “dialectic of quantity and quality,” is usually ignored or ultimately silenced in the current debates on social movements in Latin America. Empirically, nobody would question the fact that, in general, organized social sectors – including organizations as powerful as the Brazilian MST – are demographically the minority not only in the overall population, but even in their own popular sectors.[10] A notable partial exception are movements like the Argentinian “puebladas,” the Cochabamba Water War, the Peruvian Arequipazo or the case of certain particularly homogeneous indigenous zones, like the Norpaceño Aymara in Altiplano, where the organized social actors are able to move almost an entire population, strongly identified with a “dense” geographic or cultural space, in defense of a claim or of a local resource endowed with great material and symbolic resonance. However, these cases, while significant, are relatively exceptional.

Generally, while it may appear a trivial consideration, the frequently minority character of social movements does not receive the attention it deserves. The silent removal of the subject contributes the same motivational dynamics as the middle-class intellectuals who are considered allies of, or close to, social movements and who participate in them in various ways (solidarity, advice, training, communication, political mediation, etc). Often, the uprootedness and discomfort of professional intellectuals are due to their ambiguous social location ("the dominated fraction of the dominant class," to use Bourdieu's term), to the decline of the moral authority of book learning and to the relative loss of prestige of specialists not in directly 'productive' areas, resulting from the joint influence of mass audiovisual culture and neoliberal technocratic economics. In this frustrating and disillusioned social universe, to be alongside or within the social movements is like taking a bath of authenticity, recharging the moral batteries in the warmth of the popular community and feeling the pulse beat of a sometimes idealized and sentimentalized people.

From this idea – generally implied – it is very easily extrapolated that social movements are the potential center of gravity of the popular or subaltern, or that the supposed “alienation” or “false consciousness” of the unorganized, nonmobilized sectors of the people are only the distorted image, while the militant popular movements are the teleological truth. However, a little sociological realism would show that this is not the case. Several other factors can be mentioned, without resorting to invoking a capitalist conspiracy to demobilize the masses, with a much more determinant weight than social movements in the moral, intellectual and political formation of the subaltern sectors. We mention only two of them: television and its complex relations with the dynamics of urban popular culture; and the extraordinary rise of Pentecostal movements. The important subject of the changes in social consciousness and the public space by audio-visual means – which are not, nor must they be, unilaterally “negative” and “alienanted” – are too complex to deal with here. As for the new, neo-Pentecostal forms of popular religion, they are seen by many observers as a sui generis form of modernization-individualization, all combining a range of socio-economic, therapeutic and ethical-spiritual functions, whose meaning is not univocal. However, not only their quantitative dimension – they reach between 15% and 20% of the Latin American population, and proportionately more in the subaltern sectors[11] – but more importantly, their impact on the moral and material economy of the popular classes may make them the most massive movement of self-organization and popular self-advancement in the history of the continent. This phenomenon, which is just beginning to be explored by religious sociology experts, is still totally beyond the horizon of reflection of the Latin American left.[12]

So it is not only that the “pulse of the people” beats in all these spaces, but also that the same increasing plurality, the incongruity and the relative immeasurability of the various spheres of the popular “lifeworld” considerably complicates the panorama. That said, while a symbolic, ontological or sociological “center of gravity” of the people does not exist, that fact does not mean that the subaltern sectors are evolving in a kind of postmodern limbo of fluidity and hybridity, forever changing and resistant to any formalization. In spite of the destructurization of working hours and of the “symbolic precariousness” imposed by the informality and the socioeconomic complexity of peripheral post-Fordism, the same exigencies of survival and reproduction against neoliberal penetration themselves trace lines of fracture and of partial recomposition, and favor the emergence of plebeian democratic narratives around expressions like “those who do not live on other people's work”, “the simple and working people”[13] and the various "sins" (sin tierra, sin empleo, sin viviendo; without land, jobs, housing). In this sense, in decisive circumstances, social movements can still function as what used to be called “vanguards of the people.”

However, only if the concrete sociological contexts – the more or less routinized forms of coordination between the movements' protest and political work and the everyday life of the great majority – are taken into account, will we be able to rationally evaluate the relative effectiveness, the scope and the hegemonic and transformative potential of their intervention. For the same reason, the question (merely "demographic" in appearance) of size, quality, regularity, cohesion and density of individual and collective participation in social movements cannot be neglected, as if it is too self-evident to be analyzed carefully and without ideological or sentimental populist prejudices. On the other hand, only organizational ingenuity and concrete experimentation in the "internal institutionalization" of social movements (while decidedly rejecting the illusion of abstract counterposition of "formal democracy" and "real democracy," or "participatory democracy" and "representative democracy"), can give us instruction as to finding the best way to relate to the (nonmobilized, or less mobilized) rest of society, and simultaneously to face the dangers of dilution, opportunism and cooptation, as well as those of professionalization of militants, sectarianism and disconnection from reality.

The dilemma of anticapitalism
Are social movements necessarily “antisystemic”? Do they foreshadow, in some way that is not purely rhetorical, the overcoming of the present patterns of production and redistribution of social wealth? In reality, this question divides into two: (1) Can social movements exist without being politically progressive and/or socially emancipatory? (2) Are progressive social movements enscribed with a credible perspective of overthrowing capitalism?

In order to answer the first question, it seems to me difficult to deny that mobilizations like, for example, those that were fomented against lawlessness by Juan Carlos Blumberg in Argentina, or the “March of Silence” against delinquency in México City[14], display all the classic social movement characteristics defined by sociology.[15] The existence of clearly “reactionary” social movements - and perhaps of reactionary values in some progressive movements - can only strengthen my line of argument. However, for reasons of space and convenience, I am limited to examining the problem of anticapitalist or socialist potential of social movements generally recognized as "progressive." The problem has two aspects: the beliefs and rational expectations of the movements, and the concrete content of its practices in action and organization.

James Petras, the verbose U.S. academic, dedicated most of a recent article to preaching to the Latin American left about its dearth of revolutionary dynamism, unleashing his fury at the Salvadoran FMLN leader Schafik Hándal, who had confessed to him, speaking of socialism, “that it will take centuries, it's very far off.”[16] In a more diplomatic tone, the farabundista leader expressed his point of view on the subject: “In fact, our supposed radicalism cannot be defined at present as total anticapitalism. […] we do not call for the immediate abolition of capitalism in general, of every form of capitalist relations of production, distribution and exchange [but] to abolish dependent neoliberal capitalism and to assure national development with social justice and participatory democracy, that it overcomes poverty, deep and chronic unemployment, and educational, cultural and scientific-technical backwardness, that guarantees health, housing, the environment, gender equity; that reactives the economy, restructures and fortifies the underlying national productive, agricultural and industrial structure, supports small and medium-sized enterprises, cooperative enterprises and the development of regional integration.”[17]

This is highly symptomatic of the present ideological situation of the left in that nobody in Latin America, however radical their political genealogy – even a guerrilla movement like the FARC – seriously proposes another perspective.[18] I do not have any principled objection to Schafik Hándal's exposition, although it would be possible to discuss it in detail forever. What worries me is that the more or less tacit conformity – or confused silence – on proposals of this type, reflects not only the poverty, but the flat-out nonexistence of any serious and coherent debate on the form and content of a possible postcapitalist society, neither in the ranks of the so-called revolutionaries or those of the so-called reformists.

I see two reasons for this slight omission. First, beyond superficial and unconvincing reactions – like: "the Soviet Union was the victim of an imperialist conspiracy," or the reverse: "we never had anything to do with the Soviet model"[19] – in Latin America, the resounding failure of the regimes of Eastern Europe and some of its clients and allies in the third world – not to mention the paradoxical evolution of the People's Republic of China – was never processed properly by the left on the level of theoretical and strategic reflection. This applies a fortiori to a subject that is completely taboo in the Latin American left, what some Cuban official economists discreetly call "the exhaustion of the regime of extensive growth," meaning the catastrophic performance of the Soviet-style command economy on the Caribbean island – subsidized before by the USSR, now by emigration and tourism dollars.[20]

The second reason, intimately tied with the first, is that on the continent there is no reflection, not even the yearning to seriously reflect on the institutional forms, the economic and anthropological incentives and the motivational mechanisms that could make viable, in the medium and long term, a democratic socialism in the world in general, and third world countries in particular.[21]

However, the Latin American anticapitalist and anti-imperialist left share a tendency to frequently make an escape from problematizing the concrete institutionality of postcapitalist society by postulating the existence of an anthropological communitarian and solidaristic substratum that would recover and revitalize the ability to define the essential characteristics of an indigenous socialism or an alternative development model. There exist, obviously, philosophical and ideological antecedents of this thesis in several syntheses of socialism and romantic populism that emerged in nineteenth century Europe – we recall the famous debate between Marx and Vera Zasulich on the Russian mir (traditional peasant community) – and various equivalent formations working the same way in other geographic-cultural spaces. Likewise, in Latin America one can cite innumerable conceptions and variations on this theme, from more or less articulated theoretical hypotheses with references to Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss, or historical and anthropological works on resistance to capitalist modernization by the peasantry's moral economy or by popular sectors, to a plain and simple essentialist rhetorical cliché.

It will be enough to mention the emblematic formulation – midway between a theory and a catchphrase – of one of the principal opinionmakers of the continental left, Eduardo Galeano: "It is based on hope and not nostalgia that we must recover a mode of communitarian production and a way of life founded not on greed but on solidarity, on ancient liberties and the identification of human beings with nature. […] A lethal system for the world and its inhabitants, it befouls the water, annihilates the Earth and poisons the air and soil, is in violent contradiction with the cultures that maintain that the Earth is sacred because we, its children, are sacred. These despised and negated cultures deal with the Earth as their mother and not as raw material and a source of income. Against the capitalist law of profit, they propose a life of sharing, reciprocity, mutual aid that in the past inspired Thomas More's utopia and that today helps to discover the American face of socialism, whose deeper roots lie in the tradition of the community."

In the same way, but with a more precise lexicon, Anibal Quijano maintains that “the socially oriented private sector and its nonstate public sphere,” as they are found in Andean communities, can serve more as a basis for a “noninstrumental reason” focused "more on the ends than on the means, and more on liberation than on power.”[22] The apparent ideological plausibility of this exposition has been considerably strenghthened by the emergence in several countries, in particular Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia, of powerful indigenous-rural mobilizations which laid the foundations for a politically autonomous indianismo – rejecting the paternalism and "ventriloquism"[23] of traditional indigenous currents promoted by white-mestizo intellectuals – with the practices of self-managed organization and reproduction/survival of popular movements like the Brazilian MST (productive settlements, systems of skills development and training), the Argentinian piqueteros (various dining halls, schools, cooperatives and enterprises), or their worker compatriots of the empresas recuperadas (worker cooperatives in occupied workspaces). Naturally, to those who would tar the advocates of a community-inspired indigenous socialism with naivete or atavism – particularly from the point of view of defending representative democracy and liberal modernity (either in its neoliberal or more or less social-democratic variants) and economic and social efficiency – Indianists and neo-communalists answer in general that they don't seek to return to an idealized communal agrarian life themselves, nor do they reject the essential conquests of modernity, but that they arrive at a harmonious synthesis according to the social and cultural conditions of the Latin American people. In summary, socialism no longer would be “Soviets plus electricity,” but “ayllu [Incan political unit] plus optical fiber,” or “self-management plus the Internet.”

Unfortunately, at this level of sociological abstraction, arguments pro and con can be posed indefinitely without ever reaching a substantial conclusion. I want to bring them down from the stratospheric heights of this civilizational debate on modernity and tradition, or on efficiency and autonomy, and try to land it on the solid ground of concrete interactions and social evolutions, without teleological prejudices about its content being either alienating or emancipatory. For that, it is essential to settle accounts with three systematic tendencies of the Latin American social-comunitarian discourse: moralism, ideologism and abstract utopianism.

1. Moralism. There is a systematic confusion of anthropological and economic categories – like the notions of "reciprocity," "redistribution" and "market" – or social categories – like "collectivism," "communitarianism," and "individualism" – with ethical or motivational categories – like "egoism" and "altruism." This confusion is very much connected to the fact that, in the left, debate about collective values, individual motivations, and forms of social organization, is usually implicit and emotional, rather than explicit and rational. In addition, the cheap moralism of certain sides of the left is an indirect effect of the theoretical amoralism of officially recognized marxisms and, in large part – although with a greater theoretical and philological complexity – of Marx himself.[24] This is not the place to enter this complex debate, but it is enough to mention two significant aspects: a) in epistemological terms, it is well known that, in the ecological and demographic-cultural context generally used by Marx, "reciprocity" is a category that can be perfectly reinterpreted in terms of "rational egoist" strategy[25]; b) on the more normative level, it is no coincidence that the resurgence of ethical debate in contemporary neo-Marxism should involve an exhaustive confrontation with liberal – in the political sense – of theories social and economic justice, nor that it should be marked by a noticeable convergence with their most radical ideas.[26]

2. Ideologism. When, for example, the Bolivian kataristas call on their followers to "remove Marx and Jesus from their head" and to replace them with the indigenous cosmovisión [worldview], they bring about a surreptitious denaturalization of the anthropological-cultural bosses of perception and interpretation of the current reality in the rural-indigenous communities of the Andean altiplano. The “cosmovisión” of precapitalist peoples is a contextualized symbolic practice, not a quasi-universalist doctrine like those of monotheist religions or modern political philosophies. Notions of "reciprocity" and "community" lose a great part of their real substance and material effectiveness when they rise to the status of ideological concepts. I don't want to deny that, in the dialectic of the "traditional" and the "modern," very often the emotional coloration that the identitary memory of ancient practices brings to such-and-such type of "modern" social or economic aspiration plays an important role, in that the partly imagined past is transformed into a criterion of the desired future by means of a complicated alchemy of necessities and expectations. In this sense, the presence and/or recovery of precapitalist communitarian practices can have a strong emancipatory meaning, and not just for those who directly live or lived with these practices. However, purely ideological exaltation of a solidaristic “cosmovisión” of original peoples entails the danger of double talk and double standard, in particular when the rhetoric of community and reciprocity cover a perfectly classical and “occidental” strategic rationality,[27] including maximized collective or individual behaviors that could be absolutely legitimate if they were taken on as they are, instead of being mystified.

3. Even without getting into the slight problem of the interaction between the local/national and the global, we can say that not only is society not a grand ayllu – including societies like Bolivia, Ecuador or Guatemala – but it cannot be, and does not have to be.[29] On the other hand, the possible organizational form of a complex postcapitalist society – and anyone who thinks getting beyond capitalism, alienation and the division of labor, much less eliminating them completely, requires unilaterally reducing social complexity, is deeply mistaken – cannot consist of a simple reproduction of the societal scale of local interactions based on minga [indigenous community gathering], ayni [culture of reciprocity] or mutirão [Brazilian collective], but requires a sui generis combination of elements of centralized (state) redistribution, mercantile interchange and communitarian reciprocity. The fact is, as I indicated, we do not have a detailed prescription, nor do we know all the ingredients in this combination – and there is no certainty that they can even be obtained in a humanly conceivable horizon of possibilities – that would enable us to build castles in the air, even castles of beautiful pre-Columbian architecture.

In this sense, the very real vernacular practices[30] of communitarian reciprocity and solidarity found in the daily life of the Latin American popular sectors should not function as the ideological standard in getting beyond the neoliberal model of development, but more modestly, and in circumstances that have to be determined cautiously, like (1) the forms of social capital that they can contribute, on a par with other social forms and dynamics, to a mode of alternative development or to the fight against dependency and subalternity, and (2) within a concrete sociological substratum - among other moral and material factors - of an ethical imaginary able to deconstruct, at least in part, the illusion of the "naturality," the "necessity" and the "eternality" of capitalist relations of production and domination. However, no existing linear sociological determinism exists that can guarantee that, by itself, such-and-such traditional or communitarian solidaristic practice, or even such-and-such practice of "modern” and urban popular self-management, has a potential that is “pansocietal” (in the sense of being applicable to a broad range of social interactions beyond its own ecological context) or "intermodal" (in the sense of concretely prefiguring the possible postcapitalist political and economic institutionalization of a mode of production and social organization[31]). It is not even necessary to support Hernando de Soto's defense of popular capitalism[32] to understand that the community networks in which lower-class social actors are involved can serve as social capital to spur the spontaneous development of unequal relations of mercantile accumulation within the popular economy.

And so we return to the problematic character and the ambivalence of the supposed “antisystemic” character of social movements; not only on the level of its relative ideological indetermination (uncertainties of socialist perspective), but of the movements' pattern of “alternative” practices that seem to justify extrapolations on their anticapitalist potential. I do not mean that social movements are totally prisoners of the visible range of prevailing relations of production and domination, to be modified only in extremely limited and perhaps ephemeral spaces; however, this assumed anticapitalist or postcapitalist potential cannot be evaluated without taking into account the totality of political and ideological mediations, on the one hand, and on the other, of “infrastructural” socio-economic and anthropological conditions that condition their content and range of influence.

Provisional Conclusions
As I said at the outset, the viability of social movements is a sine qua non for any transformative dynamic, but the existence of powerful and aggresive social movements is not enough to infinitely expand the boundaries of the possible. We see in this illusion a rather anemic, or falsely humble version of the historical optimism of the traditional socialist workers' movement--one no longer looks to the infinite wisdom of the party, but to the infinite creativity of the movements--that was founded on excessively simplified philosophical and epistemological premises: everything desirable is possible, and, by virtue of the “laws of history,” everything supposedly possible is inevitable. Nowadays, movements that take part in the dynamics of the World Social Forums are happy to affirm that 'another world is possible,' without taking the trouble to define the paths to this other world. This caution is not so questionable in itself, but lack of definition can be another form of “living a lie” for a left that often has to deal with emergencies involving power and leadership. So, new forms must be found to outline and articulate “minimum program” and “maximum program,” an intensely political task that no social movement can deal with in isolation.

I will probably be accused of advocating a mixture of “politico” elitism and vulgar reformist “posibilismo,” thus demonstrating the pettiness of my utopian imagination. As the Argentinean comrades of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD) of La Matanza say, the accusation of reformism does not worry me much, since “It's tough to be attacked as a reformist when you don't know you are one. But it's good to know it, because then people can't guilt-trip you."[33] I am perfectly willing to submit to this type of challenge as long as it comes with a minimum of developed argument and empirical illustrations. That is why, in a later article that will be able to perhaps pick up on observations and possible criticisms provoked by these reflections, I will set out to develop a more positive agenda and try to apply the famous questions of Kant – What can I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope? – to the strategic perspectives of the social movements.

NOTES
[1] The large Renault auto factory, labor stronghold of the French Communist Party.

[2] Change The World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, University of Michigan Press, 2002.

[3] Raúl Zibechi, “Movimiento social y poder estatal: relaciones peligrosas”, ALAI, 10/08/2004.

[4] Alvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia”, in AA.VV., Tiempos de rebelión, Muela de Diablo Editores, La Paz, 2001. García advanced the concept of “movilización pactista”, later adapted, with certain nuances, by indigenous Ecuadorians.

[5] Fernando Guerrero y Pablo Ospina, El poder de la comunidad. Ajuste estructural y movimiento indígena en los Andes ecuatorianos, CLACSO, Buenos Aires, 2003. Ver también Augusto Barrera, Acción colectiva y crisis política. El movimiento indígena ecuatoriano en la década de los noventa, Abya Yala, Quito, 2001.

[6] In fact, participation in the government of [coup leader and Ecuadorian President] Gutiérrez was not the cause of the crisis and of the division of the movement, as Zibechi suggests. To the contrary, the internal divisions of the CONAIE [Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador], and the electoral appetites of some “social” leaders that oriented [CONAIE’s] Pachakutik “political” movement toward alliance with Gutiérrez, were only a little worse than the lack of a candidate chosen by consensus, and the division of the center-left.

[7] Subcomandante Marcos, “Leer un video,” published in various electronic media.

[8] As reported by Pablo Ospina.

[9] Alvaro García Linera, op. cit.

[10] Some of the more important and active Latin American social movements are rural movements working in majority urban societies. It is certain that, in spite of ferocious slander campaigns carried out by the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the media, a movement like MST gained great acceptance in Brazilian opinion. However, one should not confuse popularity with hegemony. The case of the Zapatistas is quite illustrative.

[11] It is possible to make (obviously imprecise) estimations, on the bases of the approximate aggregation of national data and the rate of exceptional growth observed in several countries. See David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990. The Pentecostal boom is far from being exclusively Latin American.

[12] The Brazilian sociologist Clara Mafra, for example, deplores the fact that left feminists are unable to perceive the potential for self-organization and social reconstruction of women's lives offered by evangelical churches in the marginalized sectors, in spite of their relatively conservative conception of gender relations (interview with the author). In many depressed favelas and barrios, they are the only organizations able to fight against the tremendous unravelling of the social fabric. See Clara Mafra, Os evangélicos, Jorge Zahar Editor, Rio de Janeiro, 2001.

[13] The quoted formulas are from Álvaro García, op. cit.

[14] See Subcomandante Marcos, op. cit.

[15] See, for example, Erik Neveu, Sociología de los movimientos sociales, Abya Yala, Quito, 2000. The fact that Blumberg or other players can have “moorings” with the organized political right changes nothing. That progressive social movements often have links to the political left doesn't make them any less social movements.

[16] Mario Hernandez, interview with James Petras, revista La Maza, reproducido in www.rebelion.org, abril de 2004.

[17] Schafik Hándal, “El FMLN y la vigencia del pensamiento revolucionario en El Salvador”, www.rebelion.org, September 2004. Hándal adds that it is trying “to construct the economic and social base that makes transition to a socialist society possible” and refers to the example of Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution," but nevertheless declared recently to the London Guardian: “I do not hold with dogmatic postulates of the Marxist revolution. I do not believe we live in a period of proletarian revolutions. All this must be reexamined, reality demonstrates this every day. Will our objective in Venezuela today be the abolition of private property or a society without classes? I don't believe it."

[18] Nobody except proponents of the subversive “exodus” of the movements [Hardt, Negri], and “changing the world without taking power.” Although they are rarely explicit, I suppose they start from the hypothesis that popular organizations in radical rupture from any form of political institutionality or systemic functionality spontaneously exude comunism, like spiders spinning webs. Mutant spiders from science-fiction movies, probably, since one assumes that they could little by little cover the entire planet and radically remodel its material and spiritual infrastructure with this web of self-management.

[19] In a debate in Quito on the future of the left after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I heard it said that “it is not that Marxism-Leninism is mistaken, but that it has been applied badly.” This demonstrates that the creation and the poscapitalist social consolidation of a Soviet-type formation is preceded by the social appeal in the traditional labor movement of a statist, verticalist and unanimist imaginary, alongside the deeply democratizing and emancipatory elements – conquest of rights, self-education, civic participation, valorization of the work force and creation of proletarian public spaces (see Marc Angenot, L’Utopie collectiviste. Le grand récit socialiste sous la Deuxième Internationale, PUF, París, 1993). Far from being a simple “deformation” or bureaucratic “betrayal,” it reflects the same conditions of accumulation and class and organizational composition of union and political movements shaped by the material and cultural infrastructure of capitalism in a given period.

[20] The formula "exhaustion of the regime of extensive growth" comes from Luis Suárez Salazar, former director of Centro de Estudios sobre América in Havana. I do not want to speak here of human rights in Cuba, a subject of innumerable hypocritical and opportunistic rationalizations, as much on the part of certain anti-Castroites as of confirmed Castro fans. It's enough to cite Marx: "In order to combat freedom of the press, the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race has to be defended" (Rheinische Zeitung, 1842).

[21] A notable exception is the Brazilian economist Paul Singer, historical militant of the PT and specialist of the third sector, that often mentions classic books of Nove and Kornai: Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1983; János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Princeton University Press, 1992. On market socialism, see for example: John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1994; Frank Roosevelt and David Belkin, Why Market Socialism? Voices from Dissent, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk (N.Y.), 1994; and the series Real Utopias from Verso. In Castillian, Roberto Gargarella y Félix Ovejero Lucas, Las razones del socialismo, Paidós, Barcelona, 2001, offers a beginner's guide to these debates.

[22] Both authors – Galeano and Quijano – are cited in Jorge Larrain, Identidad y modernidad en América Latina, Oceano, México, 2004.

[23] The notion of political "ventriloquism" comes from the Ecuadoran anthropologist Andrés Guerrero.

[24] See, in particular: Steven Lukes, Marx and Morality, Oxford University Press, 1985; Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, 150, March-April 1985.

[25] Literature on the subject is considerable, although little has spread outside specialized academic atmospheres. See, among others: Robert Axelrod, The evolution of cooperation, Basic Books, New York, 1984; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Is Equality Passé? Homo reciprocans and the future of egalitarian politics,” Boston Review, December 1998. For two decades the French magazine of the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences has explored this subject matter. See Revue du MAUSS, Éditions La Découverte, París.

[26] On the subject, Bolivian readers can consult my article, “El pensamiento filosófico de John Rawls”, in El Juguete Rabioso, 80, La Paz, May 2003, and my introduction to Amartya Sen, La libertad como compromiso social, Plural, La Paz, 2003. A good introduction in Castillian, with ample mention of the Marxist debate, is Will Kymlicka, Filosofía política contemporanea, Ariel, Barcelona, 1995.

[27] That is to say, in fact, universal, in my modest opinion (not very popular in these times of postcolonial relativism).

[28] Naturally, the indigenous leaders do not have a monopoly on this type of behavior, by far, and often they must “command obedience” and respect perfomance mechanisms of accounts and of democratic assembly control which the traditional political or union leaders are not subject to. Nevertheless, that does not change anything of substance in my argument.

[29] I cannot develop this subject in the space of this article. I will only mention that it conforms to much of the minimum exigencies of sociological realism such as the Marxian conception – totally ignored by various orthodox Marxisms and a large part of the heterodox – of the full development of the individual. On the liberal-romantic type of philosophical individualism of Marx and his aporias, see, among others: Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis. Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique, Gallimard, París, 1977; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique. Essai sur l’idée de marché, Seuil, París, 1979; Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1985; Gianfranco La Grassa, Costanzo Preve, La fine di una teoria: il collasso del marxismo storico del Novecento, Uncopli, Milán, 1996.

[30] See Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Boyars, Boston (Mass.), 1981, and Le Genre vernaculaire, Seuil, París, 1983. I use the term coined by Illich to insist on the socially and ecologically contextualized character – embedded, as the anthropologists would say – of these practices. Nevertheless, I do not exclude the possibility of producing virtuous circles connecting local communitarian practices with dynamic global democratization in the political and the economic domains.

[31] The term "intermodal" is used by Costanzo Preve, op. cit., to describe the classic Marxist conception of the industrial working class, whose historical-structural location anticipates the overthrow of class society.

[32] Hernando de Soto, El Otro Sendero, Editorial Diana, Mexico 1986; El misterio del capital, Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 2002.

[33] “Seduciendo al capital: el MTD de La Matanza y sus alianzas con los empresarios”, 13/7/2004, www.lavaca.org.