Author: Giorgos Velegrakis

by Aram Ziai

The article is a highly interesting piece which demonstrates the author‘s familiarity with the theoretical debate about anti-capitalist revolutions as well as with current oppositional social movements. However, coming from a different theoretical tradition than the author I found its argument sometimes hard to follow and was not quite convinced by a number of theoretical claims – also in the light of its own analysis of social movements.

If the „state has to be seen as it is, a political and institutional expression of capital and totalitarian economic control“ (2), does this hold true for all states equally, including Burkina Faso under Sankara and Bolivia under Morales?

To me, a conception of state as condensation of relations of power (going back to Nicos Poulantzas) allows for more nuances – all the while bearing in mind the strategic selectivity (Jessop) of the state, which can be easier used for some purposes than for others.

In my view, the author‘s analysis shows the inadequacy of some of the more apodictic statements such as that movements either “support the politics of the State-Capital” or not: “There can be no middle ground here.” (3) I think in particular the Gilets Jaunes example demonstrates that the reality of social movements often is more complicated or contradictory than that and that non-revolutionary movements can evolve over time from demanding improvements within the status quo to demanding a new conception of politics beyond representative democracy based on capitalism.

I have to admit the main claim about revolutionary immanence has not become clear to me, as have some others. What does it mean if „movements of perpetual oppositionality have to transcend themselves“ (11)? Or even „transcend space-time“ (11)? What does „learning to see beyond the capitalist real“ (11) entail? Or even the „empirical real“ (1)? Does it presuppose that there is another, more profound, objective reality, only accessible to those versed in Marxism? Why should it be – given that the Occupy movement was heavily relying on indebted students and the Zapatista rebellion even more on indigenous peasants – that „only the proletariat can keep the rebellion going” (11)? And if “whosoever revolts against the State-Capital tyranny and for a non-state non-capital world is part of the proletariat” (11), does it not render the analysis of classes and their position within a capitalist system superfluous?

I think very interesting and important conclusions could be drawn from the empirical analysis of the text regarding revolutionary theory-building: concerning the necessity of organised movements but not of parties (and of organising vs. organisations), concerning the necessity of long-term and horizontal processes, and not least concerning the vastly different contexts in which oppositional movements arise and act. In discussing the Gilets Jaunes, Occupy and the Zapatistas, it can be demonstrated what a „belief in horizontality“ and a „disbelief in vanguardism“ (1) can mean for movements. These beliefs – an important feature of „new internationalism“ – were the result of a critical reflection of Marxist internationalism in the 20th century. Another equally important feature was the proposition that different relations of oppression are equally to be taken seriously, e.g. patriarchy and racism, which led to an abandonment of the belief that Marxism is a sufficient theoretical basis for emancipation. In my view, the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham may provide inspiration how to rethink notions of revolution in a way which is able to deal with the complexities and contradictions of questions of class and identity in the 21st century of which Marx simply could not have been aware.

by Soumitra Ghoshs

Introduction: theories of movements, but where is the praxis?

Murray Bookchin once commented that the tragedy of Marxism was that it had become a subject of cloistered academic seminars and not living movements (Bookchin 2015). Today’s anti-capitalist mobilisations do not call themselves Marxists, he observed. The recorded experiences of the various square movements, insurrections and revolutions of recent years tend to bear this out. Precious few important theoretical works have been written on these movements by grounded practitioners with Marxist backgrounds, with the notable exception of the movements in Bolivia and Venezuela. Conversely, a corpus of new, largely academic, Marxist literature has sprung up within the last decade. The overwhelming majority of today’s more revered, more widely read Marxist thinkers are academics. Though their writings offer many new insights into thepolitics, history and philosophy of old and new struggles and constitute a collective effort to reinvent and resituate Marxist theory in today’s context, they do not, in our view, work as instances of theory in practice or as something that would or could be put into practice anytime soon. It is only to be expected that any discussions of revolutionary immanence or political strategies of movements in general will be informed by readings of specific movements. This is crucial because despite a lot of commonality, no two struggles are intrinsically alike. This is not enough to say that social movements today believe in horizontality and disbelieve in vanguardism and parties or that the multitude is the new revolutionary agency in the world of biopolitical capital. Unless every facet of each specific movement process is examined in detail, such generalisations become meaningless; as a result, Marxist theories lose their uniqueness and do not really help in changing the world. If on a certain day in 2011, the New York Times front page happens to carry news of various revolutions, insurrections, movements and assemblies happening across the globe, should this lead us to infer that a global social movement is raging (Buck-Morss 2013)? Since the events making up this “global” movement are various and end equally variously, it all leads to another inference that revolutions are no longer possible but things change nonetheless through non-class popular mobilizations and non-violent resistance (Hardt 2010; Negri 2010). But what has changed precisely? Has the reign of capital been brought to an end? Has the state disappeared or stopped protecting capitalist plunder? Our uncritical belief in the empirical real —largely sensed through the audiovisual media these days — and our obsessive generalisation of the evental blind us to the very idea of immanence: we cannot see beyond the visible present.

Though this paper does not focus on the inadequacy of today’s Marxist theories, one interesting fact merits mention. While Marxist analyses and critiques of specific contemporary movements are almost entirely lacking, several not avowedly Marxist accounts do exist, written by sympathetic researchers, journalists, academics and activists alike. We refer to many of these, in addition to old and new Marxist readings, while framing our problematic about the ‘anti-capitalist’ social movements in today’s world.

Trying to frame the problematic

In order to act as agents of social and political transformation, movements of anti-capital resistance need to find the right problematic. A movement needs to situate its more immediate tasks within the wider political context (Barker 2013). For the purposes of our discussion here, this wider political context has to be understood through dialectical reasoning encompassing the follies/achievements/lessons of the past and the challenges/probabilities of the future (Marx 1869, 1891, 1895; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010; Mészáros1995,2015; Zibechi 2010, 2015; Sotiris 2015; Barker et al. 2013; Krinsky 2013).

Our hypothesis is that movements need to distance themselves from the lure of operating within a “known” present that contains capital, state and immediate resistance (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015; Sotiris 2015; Jay 2016). The problematic must include the state in its entirety, taking in both parliamentary democracy and its known post-capitalist revolutionary variants, which have largely been rejected by history. The state has to be seen as it is: a political and institutional expression of capital and totalitarian economic control (Marx 1869, 1891, 1895; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015; Zibechi 2010; Marcos 2018; Sotiris 2015; Barker et al. 2013; Lenin (1917):2016).

We propose that if movements are to shift away from statism and the State-Capital hegemony, this may only be done positionally.

In other words, an all-pervading oppositional must inform every step of the process.

This oppositional is the oppositional knowledge that makes movements both necessary and possible; movements as social collectives have to know that they cease to exist as movements if they do not perpetually confront the State-Capital in its entirety. We have consciously decided to say State-Capital rather than the state and capital, because the state can no longer be viewed separately from capital nowadays (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010; Bookchin 2015; Balso 2010; Negri 2010). The oppositional in the movement is an expression of its intrinsic oppositionality, the sum of the oppositional knowledge that transforms an event or singularity fixed in time and space into a political continuity. We argue that the knowledge of how this is being done, or would or should be done in a particular time and space — in other words, the political strategy of movements — also includes the knowledge of what was done, not only in the immediate past but also long ago. However, let us first briefly examine the generic question of “social movements” to see how oppositionality has always permeated the notion of movements.

State and society: deconstructing the “social” in social movements

In trying to elucidate the concept of “social movements”, we will follow Marx, who repeatedly expounded the duality of state and society. Society must be understood as distinctly separate from the state, which is parasitic and thus external to the former. Talking about the relationship between the state and society in late 19^th-century France in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx said that the state “enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society […] through” a “most extraordinary centralisation” and that “this parasitic body acquires […] an omniscience”, finding a “counterpart in the […] actual body politic”. Marx further said that because the “excessive state machine” and “the material interests of the French bourgeoisie” are closely interwoven, the state has to “wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion”, mutilating, crippling and if possible, “amputating […] the independent organs of the social movement”.

According to Marx, society, public opinion and social movements occupy spaces that not only exist naturally outside the state and the body politic, but are also opposed to them. While discussing the momentous events of the Paris Commune, he once again said that as the “class antagonism between capital and labour” (emphasis added) intensified, the “state power” became conterminous with “national power of capital over labour” and became “a public force organised for social enslavement” and “an engine of class despotism”. Marx went on to comment that the Paris Commune reorganised “the unity of the nation” through the “Communal Constitution” and the destruction of the “state power” that claimed to be “independent of, and superior to, the nation itself”.

We can say that social movements imply oppositional reorganisation of the order enforced by power: power represented by the state in league with capital, which comes at the culmination of a process of accumulation. Wherever this process took place, it remade the actuality of society and reconstructed the very idea of social. Young Marx called it alienation: humans becoming estranged from their collective species-being as human labour was first forcibly, and then through a curious “voluntary” process no less forcible at the end, torn away from humans (Marx 1844). This caused a break, a rupture in the universality of being. As the species-being was forcibly made to lose its sense of collective subjectivity, the society that was primarily an expression of the universality of the species-being became something else (Marx 1844; Marx/Engels 1976; Mészáros 1970). However, there has always been a dialectical process of going back and forward, from the private to the collective, the self to the other, a battle against capital and the fetish its rule creates. A journey of collective assertion and anti-power, as John Holloway (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010) says, and which we call oppositionality. The oppositional movement reinvents, reconstructs and reclaims the social by creating a new collective identity.

In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx commented that social movements do not exclude political movements and political movements cannot but be social. This means class and class struggle, because societies cannot be conceived outside the class framework as long as that framework exists. Therefore, all social movements, even those with economic demands, are also political. When we say this, we expand what Marx said (Marx 1871). To Marx, economic demands seeking resolution within the intrinsic limits of the capitalist production system are not political; the economic becomes political only when it transgresses the system. We say both are political. The first kind of politics is that of capital, hence the state. The second kind of politics is anti-capital, therefore non-state. Dialectically, the state holds the non-state within it, one kind of politics the other, which goes on to negate it (Mészáros 2015; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010). There is no point in theorising social movements as autonomous extra-political entities that are free from enormous burdens of histories and carve emancipatory futures out of perfect emptiness. No such emptiness ever existed. All movements are the products of histories, and all human histories are of class struggles. Movements can, knowingly and also often unknowingly, support the politics of the State-Capital. Movements can also support the politics of the non-state and anti-capital; they can express and embody the non-state within the state, the anti-capital within the capital. There can be no middle ground here.

A movement, however, finds its expression through a degree of organisation. While our construct of social movements, after Marx and Holloway, as collective assertions of anti-state, anti-capital social outpouring is unlikely to meet with many challenges, the concept of organisation has always been a controversial one. What, precisely, do we mean by an organisation of the “bottom”? How does it differ, both structurally and functionally, from organisations at the “top”? When we refer generically to the “grassroots”, are we talking about structurally similar processes? What does an Adivasi (tribal) movement focused on forest and land tenure rights in an Indian forest have in common with the indigenous Aymara movement in El Alto, Bolivia or the gilets jaunes in contemporary France? Do they all represent the same social constituencies and have same demands (Krinsky 2013)? How do these movement processes function as organisations? More importantly, do they see themselves as organisations, as institutional entities? This needs to be examined in greater detail.

Social movements: the questions of organising and organisation

The representational of the Leninist party and social democracy

How to approach the questions of organisation and organising? Here, we understand organisation to refer to institutional bodies such as various communist/leftist parties, the mass processes affiliated with these, non-party social movements, and movement alliances. By organising, we mean the primary social process of the oppositional mobilising and building up various social collectives including movements, in clear distinction from organisation. This question should not be seen as a purely context-specific, strategic question or as a question that leads to inflexible political positions. The last century saw a surfeit of organisations. The revolution that embraces the complex fabric of society and emerges from its embryo (Marx 1869) became epitomised in the concept of the vanguard party, making what was merely representational and transitory (Luxemburg 1904, 1918) a political truth, or rather the only political truth. Though we are not discussing the question of parties at length here, a few words might not go amiss given that social movements have never really been far from parties, vanguard or otherwise. Moreover, of late there has been a renewed plea for the revival of Leninist parties (Dean 2012,2013, 2016; Žižek 2010), ostensibly to plug the gap between the chaos of the crowd in the streets (represented by social movements) and the immanence of emancipatory politics.

Movements, be it entire movements or just parts thereof, are constantly being transformed into parties. Inversely, parties have been known to initiate movements: the vanguard party was conceived not only to direct movements, but to ensure that movements were revolutionary enough to seize state power (Lenin 1917). As Jodi Dean (Dean 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b) keeps on reiterating, there can be no discussion of the left without a discussion of the party—the left is the party.

It is beyond dispute that more than social movements or even unions, parties have so far dominated the discourse of transformatory politics. We need only look at Latin America and Europe to see this confirmed: social upsurges and resistance to capital are often co-optated, resulting in a new flurry of social democracy led by the so-called new left or progresismo (Zibechi 2010, 2014, 2015; Dangl 2010; Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Webber 2011, 2015; Modonesi 2015). Influential mobilisations tend towards party formation as a way of dealing with the political realities more effectively, which means engaging with the state. Following the footsteps of the revolutionaries of the 19^thcentury, John Holloway (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015) Raúl Zibechi (Zibechi 2010, 2014, 2015) István Mészáros (Mészáros 1995, 2015) and Alain Badiou (Badiou2010a, 2010b), among others, posit that anti-capital must be anti-state by default and that a good state is not possible. Despite this, parties flourish, and movements get tamed through involvement in statist exercises. Why does social democracy reappear, forcing us to listen to the same old litany of societies in transition, the impossibility of immediate revolutions and the pressing need for experiments with parliamentary democracy (García Linera 2006, quoted in Bosteels 2014; Webber 2015; Iglesias 2015)? Though we are no longer in the period of the Second International and communists are no longer challenging revisionists, the pattern is very familiar.

The problem is not the parties per se, but rather their emergence. Why do successful mass movements result in parties? How did the oppositional essence of the indigenous Aymara movement in Bolivia get diluted into the populism of MAS (Movement for Socialism, the party led by Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera)? What caused the Greek people to support Syriza again, even after its betrayal in 2015(Sotiris 2015; Kouvelakis 2016)? Do people need states? Do they need to be governed, told what to do? Do we not need a better understanding of the enigma of the state? Holloway’s and Badiou’s anti-state texts do not indicate how our screams against injustices and tyranny can coalesce in ways that are strong and sustainable enough to take on the state — in other words, in conscious processes of slow organising to achieve not cosmetic, but metabolic change (Mészáros 1995, 2015). Because such processes do not just automatically emerge: the question here is whether we can transform our servile, oppressed and increasingly market-opiated subjectivities into collective revolutionary subjectivity, will or desire (the last a Lacanian derivative used by both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, as well as Jodi Dean) solely through screams, flashes of resistance and occasional inspirations? Do we not need something more coherent, relentless, vertical and yet horizontal?

Do social movements have a generic tendency to resolve opposition to the state, and new parties offer promises of this resolution? Yet movements have been known to persist outside typical party spaces, even after parties emerge and become dominant. A good example is Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra or Landless Movement, popularly known as MST: throughout and in spite of its long-standing relationship with the PT, the Brazilian Workers’ Party, it lost none of its organisational independence, influence and relevance (Dangl 2010; Stedile 2002). Despite its earlier co-optation, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) — as the October 2019 movement and its many predecessors showed — does not seem to have lost its insurrectionary potency (Zorilla 2015; Becker 2015; Zibechi2014, 2015). The movements in Argentina seem to have recovered sufficiently (Aranda 2016; Sitrin 2012; Fiorentini 2012) from the rut of the Kirchner era (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005;Dangl 2010) in 2001-2002.

Coming back to the Leninist party, it appears that the party began to replace the society and the working class as the primary site of oppositional politics (Holloway 2002, 2005; Lebowitz 2012; Luxemburg 1918; Levi 2011). Social polarities, such as a range of different classes, occupied and colonised the party that was originally supposed to act as the vanguard of a particular class, namely the proletariat. Domination of the party by class/classes became domination of society, especially in situations where the party could control the state (Lebowitz 2012; Zurbrugg 2016; Hui 2016a, 2016b). The party controlled not by the proletariat but by the ruling classes persistently pre-empted any revolutionary struggles, responding ever more efficiently and ruthlessly (Lebowitz2012; Mao 1973; Hui 2009; Chaohua 2015). The representational of the Leninist party ultimately came to signify usurpation of the social dialectic of class struggles, thus destroying the oppositionality in the oppositional.

Replacing the oppositional social with the representational of the Leninist party and social democracy also meant replacing organising with the organisation. Because the leftist practices of the last 150 years or so have thus far largely followed the “representational” and statist politics of the organisation, they have failed to critically explore the all-important question of the politics of organising. We will come back to this later.

Organisationlessness: the politics of anarchy and the apolitical of the event

If the dominant mode of leftist organising in the last century was expressed through the party, the dominant mode of revolutionary organising today appears to be under-organising and un-organisationality. Beginning with the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements of the turn of the century and continuing on through the anti-austerity movements in Europe and Latin America and finally the Occupy-type movements in the US and Europe, there has been a marked and often deliberate display of distrust in organisations, particularly structured ones such as the party (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Taylor et al. 2011; Clover 2016; Dean 2012, 2016). Anarchist opposition to all forms of organisations and organised processes has reappeared, particularly among the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Indignados in Spain, the street protesters in Greece and the Horizontalidad in Argentina (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Dean 2016). Mobilisations have become carnivals of the faceless multitude, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Hardt/Negri 2005) said. Without delving too far into whether movemental mobilisations are indeed carnivalesque in nature, we can say that today’s mobilising does have something of an “evental” and casual character (Dean 2016; Jameson 2015; Jay 2016), which is quite disturbing. Distrust in organisation is not just a historical response to the tyranny of the representational and the repressive history of party-states, it also masks a deeper absence of oppositionality. This has also been termed post-ideological and post-modern (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Dean 2016). The oppositional core of anti-capital seems to be holding from one movement to the next, but for how long? Movements that eschew organisational processes altogether are likely to fail in their primary task of organising the social opposition to enable it to continue beyond events. Furthermore, they tend to either become more representational than parties through their charismatic leaders (the rise of Evo Morales from Bolivia’s Aymara movement is a case in point: see Zibechi 2010, 2014) or be co-optated by big NGOs and the state (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Zibechi 2010).

Framing the politics of organising and organisation today

As happened in the international working-class movement in the second half of the 19^thcentury and the beginning of the 20^th century, organising–organisation has become one of the most crucial political questions. While we cannot prescribe an ideal form of organising that will become the new norm, we can and must discuss the possibilities strand by strand and context by context.

It is clear that the fallacies of organising and organisation will not sort themselves out overnight: each new process of organising might inexorably result in a new organisation with new leaders and a fresh hierarchy. Movements-as-organisations, whether party or not, will be more vulnerable to co-optation by the state, as is borne out by many recent experiences from across the world: India, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece and, probably, Spain. Inversely, organisations and even states have been known to initiate and foster movements by organising from below: examples include the Zapatista agricultural communes in Chiapas (Hesketh 2013; Oikonomakis 2016, 2019; Khasnabish 2010; Gahman 2016); the Rojava communes in Kurd-occupied Syria, which were inspired by the writings of social ecologist Murray Bookchin (Dirik 2016; Leverink 2015); and the “communal” Chavista state of Venezuela(Mills 2015; Foster 2015; Ciccariello-Maher 2016a, 2016b). Outside the orbits of structured organisations and any form of institutionalisation, movements have been known to remain as purely organising processes, both fluid and temporal (Zibechi 2010). The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, the Indignados in Spain, and the Nuit Debout movement and gilets jaunes in France all rejected verticality of organisation, though the latter showed signs of more intense organising in the form of regular general assemblies (Sitrin 2016; Gerbaudo 2016; Sourice 2016; Kouvelakis 2019; Goanec 2019). Movements can also overlap or even take the form of riots (Badiou 2012; Clover 2016; Dean 2016).

The increasingly dominant role of the new digital media in street protests and the emergence of movements-as-spectacles form another key aspect of the organising/organisation discourse. Because the advent of the new media as an oppositional proposition raises serious questions about all previous notions of organising and disrupts the process of oppositional cognition, we need to address it separately.

The new media and social movements: emancipatory digitality or disruption of oppositional cognition?

Online networks have been hailed as potentially revolutionary (Dean 2013) and described as the revolutionary “common” where the gravediggers of capital congregate (Hardt 2010; Negri 2010). The scenario of angry and disgruntled people pouring onto the streets in response to online campaigns, “viral” Facebook/Twitter posts garnering millions of hits, and social media “events” is by now familiar (Tufekci 2017; Herrera 2014). If the events are colourful, well attended and violent, the mainstream media starts paying attention and new spectacles are born. But does this scenario, which segues from one spectacle to another, across geographies, politics and culture, raise new hopes for oppositionality? Events and spectacles are usually short-lived—once crowds shrink and the state steps in with its weaponry of repression, soft containment and co-optation, the media loses interest.

Hardt claims that capitalism is producing the common and that since the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism, the “conditions and weapons of a communist project” are now more available than ever (Hardt 2010). Both Hardt and Negri (Negri 2010) further posit that capitalist production nowadays has moved from industries to the “biopolitical” and that capital is now producing new forms of life. Hardt forgets that capital has always produced new forms of life by constantly revolutionising the means of production at its disposal as well as producing and reproducing its own social relations, and that in a fully capitalised world, commons cannot survive without being oppositional. In other words, the society of commons survives in spite of and in constant opposition to the State-Capital (Caffentzis/Federici 2014). Made-to-order revolutions are not real, for all their insurrectionary flash mobs and spectacular events. They generate images, collect millions of new social media users and boost corporate profit, but do not foster oppositionality. Facebook and Twitter revolutions are real only as instances of capitalist appropriation of the process of oppositional knowledge and/or as counter-revolutions brought into being by state agencies and their imperialist backers, such as the US State Department (Herrera 2014). A revolution as a new workspace for generating corporate profit is an impossible aberration: it cannot exist.

We must be wary of spectacles. Not all insurrections are oppositional: movements without revolutionary content either lapse into stasis, reinforce the status quo or devolve into simulacra, things that are not really there. Events and their impressive visuals represent such simulacra. The illusion of revolution displaces actual oppositional action; the real is taken over by the capitalist real, thus effectively pre-empting, or acting against, the potential revolutions that take shape more gradually.

Flashmob insurrections by themselves prove nothing. Each of them must be examined critically in order to identify the social meanings behind the images and words. Because, as the Soviet linguist Voloshinov pointed out, histories of class struggles lend meanings to words and images (Voloshinov 1973). Layers of mass-produced knowledge, along with lies and fictions, must be stripped away to get at the oppositional meanings.

Below, we analyse three contemporary movements in greater detail to better understand the reality of their oppositionality.

Movements as political continuities

Gilets jaunes: from movement-as-spectacle to Revolutionary Anarchy?

The gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement in France shows how a present-day social movement defies easy categorisation. It apparently started, like many such movements in the recent past, with an online petition and a couple of viral Facebook posts denouncing the tax burden on motorists and calling for a mass blockade of the roads. Before long, the leaderless movement had evolved into a full-blown and often violent revolt against President Macron and his government. The issue at stake was no longer simply the price of fuel (Harding 2019).

The thing to note here is that although they carried out a succession of “Acts” (spectacular demonstrations)[i] and managed to retain a high profile as a spectacle for an astonishingly long time (at the time of writing, the movement is 12 months old), the gilets jaunes cannot simply be understood in terms of their signature yellow vests and the sequence of violent incidents they came to represent, at least in the eyes of the Western media. Beyond the spectacle, slow day-to-day organising went on in occupied roundabouts and neighbourhood assemblies throughout France, where the gilets jaunes debated the future of the movement and interacted with citizens who might not be gilets jaunes, but were nonetheless angry and sceptical about what the Macron government was doing (Kouvelakis 2019). Local neighbourhood assemblies fed into a bigger Assembly of Assemblies, where representatives from several hundred gilets jaunes groups debated, framed and issued political demands and statements. At the time of writing, three Assemblies of Assemblies have taken place, with the third one at Montceau-les-Mines being attended by650 delegates representing 250 local groups from all over France (Goanec 2019). As the movement progressed, it gradually acquired more political clarity. No longer a Facebook-driven group that lacked a clear political agenda and counted among its members anti-immigrant right-wing sympathisers (Harding 2019) and perhaps a multitude of angry protesters and rioters (Harding 2018; Fassin/Defossez 2019), it decided to challenge not only the state, but also capital:

We are putting into action new forms of direct democracy. […] The Assembly of Assemblies reaffirms its complete independence from all political parties, trade unions […] We are inviting all people who want to put an end to the appropriation of the living […]to assume a conflictual stance against the actual system […] aware that we have to fight a global system, we believe that we must get out of capitalism. (TheYellow Vests’ Call after the Second Assembly of Assemblies in Saint-Nazaire, 5-7 April 2019—emphasis added)^[ii]

The second Assembly of Assemblies, from which this exhortation emanated, was relatively poorly attended (according to the preamble to the text, only 200 delegates were present, due perhaps to systematic repression by the Macron administration and also the government’s so-called participatory democracy exercise in form of the Great Debate; see Harding 2019) and the third Assembly of Assemblies had to revisit many of the points contained in the document. Despite heated debates, there emerged a consensus on “exiting capitalism” (Goanec 2019). Moreover, some of the participants referred to themselves as revolutionaries and there was a great degree of emphasis on practising a variant of libertarian municipalism originally theorised by Murray Bookchin, though engagement with the state had not been ruled out (Goanec 2019).

It appears that while the number of gilets jaunes in the street was dwindling, the movement was consciously trying to develop itself as a better-organised process with long-term political objectives. Though some organising is still done over social media, many organisers seem to prefer direct personal interaction to Facebook, which is seen as both a “site of manipulation ‘from below’ and state surveillance ‘from above’” (Kouvelakis2019). Organising is key in determining whether the gilets jaunes will survive state repression and the cycle of media indifference and attacks. No libertarian municipalism and no revolution without a disciplined, politically informed organisation, said Bookchin (Bookchin 2015), marking a clear departure from classical notions of libertarianism or communist anarchy. From the little we know of the gilets jaunes, the evident presence of many anarchist organisers in their midst could have one of two results: the movement may remain limited to local assemblies, shunning a more organised form; alternately, desperation may push it (if not the entire movement, then some parts) towards more violent street actions.

Would we call the gilets jaunes a revolutionary movement with the oppositional knowledge of its potency? It is difficult to predict how the movement, devoid ofany regular organisation, could function as a political continuity and whether its intensely oppositional character could be maintained for long in the face of repression. This issue merits further discussion.

Occupy Wall Street and Democratic Socialism

The experiences of the Occupy Wall Street(OWS) movement show that contemporary oppositional collective processes are often structurally and politically fluid. Participants and sympathisers have written extensively about the movement/events (Dean 2016; Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Bray 2013; Chomsky 2012; Taylor et al. 2011) that took place in 2011 and we will not linger over them here. However, a few observations might be relevant. First of all, for many of the participants, Occupy was a call for a world revolution.^[iii] Though the model of the “revolution” was “imported” from the Arab Spring Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt(White 2016) and action was initiated through social media(White 2016), from its very outset OWS targeted the global rule of capital and the economic, social and political inequality inherent in it. “We are the 99 percent” was an anti-capital slogan that directly targeted class rule (Dean 2016; Sitrin/Azzellini 2014), and the young and not-so-young people who took part in the Occupy movement in New York and elsewhere shared the common conviction that capital’s rule had to be challenged (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Taylor et al. 2011). OWS also re-emphasised that not only were anarchists, rather than the traditional left, emerging as the dominant voice of the left in the new movements of the 21^stcentury — from the neighbourhood councils and factory takeovers in Argentina to the popular assemblies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain — but also that the anarchist idea of direct neighbourhood democracy and horizontalism was the preferred organisational form in each case(Sitrin/Azzellini 2014).

Given this context of anarchist un-organisationality, is it not somewhat surprising that a large majority of the active occupiers gravitated towards the party form in their future organising, and that they primarily came out in support of self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders? Going by what some of the organisers of the newly launched party Democratic Socialists of America(DSA) are currently thinking (a collection of insider takes on the resurgence of leftist politics in contemporary America appeared in New Left Review; see Gong 2019; Mason 2019; Alcázar 2019; Sallai 2019; Moya 2019), it seems that either the anarchist strand within OWS has knowingly decided to embrace Marxism or the non-anarchist left was always present within the movement. Though there are many disagreements over supporting the mainstream Democratic Party and taking part in electoral politics, it appears that all the DSA organisers believe there is a need for more intense organising in the future, including unionisation and even methodical recruitment of potential organisers. There is much talk about class, class struggle and working-class organisation: “[w]e should be an organization of the working class”, argues Arielle Sallai, a DSA organiser. She says there is a lot of talk inside DSA about whether “the group itself can organize the working class towards revolution” and thinks that “DSA can and should be a revolutionary organization” which needs a “deliberate process of base building”, something which is “about politics” as well as “structure”. In a similar vein, René Christian Moya, another DSA organiser, remarks that the fate of DSA depends on its willingness “to struggle with the working class” and that “the prospects of organized labour are vital to our chances of building hegemony around socialist demands”. Moya says further that “it is a task of the organized left, in DSA and beyond, to work towards the construction of sites of power independent of the political system, and of the existing infrastructure of progressivism—including the unions”. He calls for “direct and intentional engagement with worker and community struggles”, which is “arduous, time-consuming work” (emphasis added).

Though the DSA is “a collection of fairly autonomous chapters spread across much of the United States, with wildly different leadership structures and priorities”, this does not prevent its members from asking political questions about the “form or mode of politics [that] is best suited to develop and equip the working class with the power it needs to challenge the rule of capital”. It seems that at least some of its members view the DSA as a working-class party of the future, a party whose members keep on debating about horizontality and centrality, but feel the urgent necessity of involving new people in extra-parliamentary politics through the party, while ensuring the party itself does not simply become a “move-on.org for the Twitter generation”.

In the gilets jaunes, we saw a typical street protest, a movement-as-spectacle striving to reinvent itself as a more consistent political formation of anarchists that opposes capital and state and tentatively supports libertarian municipalism. In Occupy-DSA, we find another political continuity where a predominantly anarchist movement-as-spectacle with an anti-capital political worldview is slowly morphing into what its members see as a revolutionary working-class party of the future. Our known repertoire of movement categories and oppositional politics is constantly being unmade and remade by actual movement processes that embody the historical and subjective processes of oppositional cognition. A brief look at the political-organisational history of the Zapatista movement lends weight to this statement.

Zapatismo: oppositional politics of listening

There is a growing body of literature on the Zapatistas; consequently, we need not dwell on the chronology or narratives of the succession of events and silences-without-events that raised new hopes for oppositional politics not only in Mexico and Latin America, but worldwide. Instead, let us turn our attention to how Zapatismo, as a form of oppositional politics, has evolved over the years, both historically and philosophically. This is important because the Zapatistas seem reticent about tracing the history of their movement beyond the 1994 insurrection in Chiapas. Subcommander Marcos-Galeano^[iv], the main spokesperson of the movement, likes to talk about how a “small group of urbanites” that originally arrived in the Mexican jungles to start an armed insurrection in the time-honoured Latin American tradition of Guerrilla Foco stopped in their tracks, ceased talking and started listening to the “other” —here, the indigenous people of Chiapas. “Something happened that saved us. Saved us and defeated us in those first years”, says Marcos, going on to explain how from “a movement that proposed putting the masses at its service, making use of proletarians”, peasants and others “to take power”, the Zapatistas were “turning into an army that ‘serves’ the indigenous communities.[v]

This “turning into an army that had to serve” instead of “putting the masses at its service” signals not only a renunciation of the Guerrilla Foco, but also a total epistemological reversal of the theory of revolutionary vanguardism that gained currency since the 1917 Russian Revolution and became somewhat synonymous with the left, especially the more orthodox kind of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice. Marcos elucidates further:

...our entire previous proposal, and the orthodox Left’s previous proposal up to then, was the opposite, it was: from above things are solved for below [...] this below-for-above change meant not organizing ourselves [...or...] other people to go vote, nor to go to a march […] to shout [...] but to survive and turn resistance into a school (emphasis added).

Zapatismo, born out of turning resistance into a school, transforms the entire process of oppositional learning and knowledge-making into a site for practising a new kind of revolutionary pedagogy, where the teachers themselves are taught. The actual process on the ground, however, followed a different path. The first indigenous members of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) were recruited way back in 1978-80 by the “urbanite” guerrillas who had succeeded in setting up a safe house in San Cristóbal de las Casas with the help of the indigenous people (Oikonomakis 2019). The EZLN safe houses were also schools where young indigenous recruits were taught how to read and write as well as being educated in Marxism, other typical subjects, weapon use and survival skills (Cedillo 2010; DeLa Grange/Rico 1999, quoted in Oikomomakis 2019). Once their training was complete, the students would return to their villages to become “instructors” for the next batch of newly recruited students. The EZLN still uses the same system of self-instruction in its own autonomous territories (Oikonomakis 2019). Looking at the history of the EZLN and the Zapatista revolution, we wonder how much of the new oppositional knowledge of “commanding by obeying” can be traced back to older, orthodox forms of leftist pedagogy and organising, whereby students had to be recruited and taught to prepare them for roles as militants/soldiers of the impending revolution. Though the Lacandon jungle in Mexico has witnessed many revolts, uprisings and organised denials of the Mexican state(Oikonomakis 2019; Khasnabish 2010), it cannot be considered a pre-determined, historical given that Zapatismo, with its essential philosophical otherness based on a process of learning to listen, obey and serve(Dussel 1998, quoted in Paradiso-Michau 2008), would have evolved as it did without the long and heroic efforts of the members of the hierarchical and vanguardist Marxist-Leninist party Fuerzas de Liberación  Nacional(FLN, Forces of National Liberation). The Zapatistas and the EZLN no longer talk about their FLN past (apart from remembering the martyrs), but it is a fact that the EZLN was first conceived as the rural wing of FLN in 1980(FLN 2003, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019). FLN, most likely an offshoot of a still-earlier revolutionary process called Ejército Insurgente Mexicano (EIM, Mexican Insurgent Army), was formed in 1969, and its attempts to penetrate the Lacandon jungle probably began in 1972. When, in 1993, the indigenous leaders in the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena (CCRI, Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee) and the EZLN had already decided to go to war, FLN’s leadership had to be persuaded of the desirability of the proposed course of action (Cedillo 2010; DeLa Grange/Rico 1999, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019). After a discussion that continued for several days, it was decided that from then onwards, the CCRI — in other words the EZLN’s indigenous leaders —and not the “politico-military organisation” of FLN would assume leadership of the Zapatista revolution (Le Bot/Marcos 1997, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019).

The above account proves that in the terrain of oppositional politics, neither organisational forms nor “political beliefs” are static and nothing is sacrosanct besides oppositionality. This is because both the organisational form of a movement and the convictions of its militants respond to the movement’s actuality: they have to remain fluid; otherwise, no revolutionary praxis is possible. Fluidity ensures that the learnt is constantly unlearnt and re-learnt: ideas appear, disappear and reappear. The vanguardist hierarchy of a Marxist-Leninist party can take an informed decision to dissolve itself in a from-the-below indigenous-led revolution that aims not to seize state power but to establish autonomous municipalities and territories in opposition to the capitalist nation-state and its from-the-above “geographies” (Marcos 2018). Once again, the Zapatista call for autonomy and horizontality does not stem from any anarchist concept relying on spontaneity rather than organisation. Instead, it is backed up and put into practice by a well-structured organisational network and a revolutionary army that came into being through the arduous work of generations of political workers belonging to a traditional leftist party. It is surely not a coincidence that the municipalist revolution in Rojava by the stateless Kurds, led predominantly by women, was also initiated by what was originally an orthodox Marxist-Leninist formation and is also supported by an armed militia. It is doubtful how long the autonomous cantons at Rojava and the Zapatistas’ territories could survive systematic military aggression by the capitalist nation-states that surround them were full-blown conflicts to break out, but that is a different question altogether. Besides, it is possible that all processes of oppositional politics have to face similar challenges, because the state can respond in devious ways. The art of engaging, dealing with and resisting the state forms part of the oppositional knowledge that makes revolutionary praxis possible. Movements and their militants do not acquire this knowledge through mere participation in organisations, events and un-organisational horizontality. Rather, the knowledge is born of, and is part of, the political continuities formed by the past, present and future in equal proportions: the past because revolutionary processes and ideas from the past, more than the historical evolution of production systems, inform all present oppositional processes; the present because that is where praxis unfolds, erupts and create ruptures; and the future because the emancipation of the working class and the human species, e.g. communism, is part of that future. All social movements with a political dimension must consciously and collectively situate —as well as discover — themselves in those continuities.

Conclusion: understanding and deepening oppositionality

To situate and discover themselves within fluid political continuities, movements must internationalise opposition. Without internationalisation, the horizontal grassroots of the local and the autonomy they profess to represent would probably shrivel in double quick time. Revolutions would appear and disappear, insurrections would be suppressed or co-optated, riots would succeed riots, and yet the immanence would remain unrealised: the perennial spring of freedom would never be ours.

When we talk about internationalising, we do not mean building a new revolutionary International. Internationalisation, as we see it, would require each association, assembly, union, organisation or party to acquire collective criticality. That is, each movement practice must learn to see beyond the hegemony of the capitalist real and revisit its theories, strategies and actions with relentless criticality, which cannot be compromised for the sake of organisational and other compulsions, such as state repression and the necessity of “positive” engagements with the state. Suspending criticality might help in immediate mobilising, but seriously harm the collective’s cognitive ability to grasp the oppositional not only within the society but also within the apparently autonomous spaces created by the movement collectives. As long as movement collectives are forced to exist in spatially and organisationally separate enclaves within a dominant capitalist real, any victories can only be ephemeral.

The movements of perpetual oppositionality have to transcend themselves. This transcendence is both social and political: social because the movements remake the social relations of power firstly by remaining alive and secondly through conscious oppositionality; political because the process is neither conceivable nor actualised without constant analysis, critique and confrontation of the state. Thus the transition from the particularity of an insurrection to the philosophy of a revolution, from the tumultuous moment of the evental to the eternity of the revolutionary horizon and the reclaiming of the individual, “free-active” subject: movements that organise for the present and not a future that is and isn’t part of that present fail to posit emancipatory politics. Since the working class constitutes itself as an oppositional force only through its collective political will to oppose (Gramsci 2001, quoted in Galastri 2018; Galastri 2018; Thompson 2013), whosoever revolts against the State-Capital tyranny and fights for a non-state, non-capital world is part of the proletariat (Balibar 1977, 1994). And only the proletariat can keep the rebellion going (Marx/Engels 1976; Dean 2016).

All movements and movement organisations, if they are oppositional, are part of greater political continuities that transcend space-time. We can even re-imagine a new kind of party that acts purely as a facilitator, an organiser entity, that senses the immanence but does not usurp its vanguardist agency as a higher body (Beaudet 2016; Dean 2012). It remains true to the idea of communism and communist revolution, but does not lead it by commanding. Conversely, it learns to command by obeying, as the Zapatistas do. Like the Chinese Communist Party in the pre-revolutionary China, it practises a mass line and learns from the mass, which it helps to come into being by spatially and politically linking various strands of non-state oppositionality, insurrectionary and otherwise (Hui 2016a, 2016b), existing within the capitalist real. It ensures that the oppositional knowledge of the non-state, non-capital informs the movements that unfold and erupt within the present enclosed by the State-Capital; even if the insurrections end not in a bang but pathetic whimper of social democracy, it sees the rupture latent in the event and champions the transcendence that is no longer visible. Anything is possible as long as oppositionality does not die.

Soumitra Ghosh, a social activist and independent researcher, has been working with forest communities in sub-Himalayan West Bengal in India for several decades. He has written extensively on issues related to the politics of struggles for forest Commons as well as climate justice and climate change, particularly its political economy.

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Webber, J. (2015). Burdens of a State Manager, in: Viewpoint Magazine, 25 February 2015. Available at: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/02/25/burdens-of-a-state-manager/.

White, M. (2016): The End of Protests:a New Playbook for Revolution. Toronto, Knopf Canada.

White, M. (2017). Occupy and Black Lives Matter Failed, in: The Guardian, 28 August 2017.

Zibechi, R. (2010). Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. Oakland/Edinburgh, AK Press.

Zibechi, R. (2014). Latin America Today: Seen from Below, an interview with Raúl Zibechi, in: Upside Down World. Available at: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4907-raul-zibechi-latin-america-today-seen-from-below(11 January 2016).

Zibechi, R. (2015). Ecuador: The “Citizens’ Revolution” vs Social Movements, in: Upside Down World. Available at: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5189-ecuador-the-citizens-revolution-vs-social-movements(22 June 2016).

Zorilla, C. (2015). Ecuador: Widespread Protests From Left and Indigenous Sectors, in: Upside Down World. Available at: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5436-ecuador-widespread-protests-from-left-and-indigenous-sectors-demand-progressive-changes(22 June 2016).

Zurbrugg, A W. (2016). 1917 and the ‘workers’ state: looking back in —-(2016b): The Actuality of Revolution in Panitch. L & Albo. G(ed): Rethinking Revolution: Socialist Register 2017, Merlin Books, London

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Endnotes

[i]The gilets jaunes staged their 49^th Act on 22 October 2019, roughly two weeks before the movement’s first anniversary. See https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Giletss-jaunes-Acte-49-protest-marches-honour-France-s-striking-firefighters

[ii]https://resistance71.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/english-translation-of-the-yellow-vests-call-after-the-second-assembly-of-assemblies-in-st-nazaire-april-5-7-2019/

[iii]See the homepage of Occupy: http://occupywallst.org/.

[iv] In a Zapatista programme in 2014, Marcos died as Marcos and was reborn as Galeano, another of the martyrs of the revolution. See Nick Henck(2018): Introduction to The  Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage.

[v]Subcommander Marcos’s Words for the National and International Caravan for Observation and Solidarity with Zapatista Communities, La GarruchaCaracol, 2 August 2008. Emphasis added)

by Larry Lohman

Soumitra asks: What creates the oppositional “non-state non-capital” knowledge “that makes movements both necessary and possible” (p. 2)? And that ensures that they have “political continuity” rather than being mere “singularities fixed in time and space” (p. 2)?

In part, Soumitra’s answers are negative. Transformational social movements are not built just by participating in fixed organizations, spectacular events or, for that matter, purely reactive exercises in un-organizational horizontality (p. 11). None of these things really has what it takes to challenge the “state-capital” hierarchies (p. 2) he describes.

I sympathize with Soumitra’s polemic. But I’m wondering if – maybe with a little help from Gustavo’s paper on “New Political Horizons” – there might be ways of identifying the objects of his criticism more clearly. The idea would be to limit the collateral damage that his critique might otherwise inflict on what I reckon are not his real targets. And maybe to find better-defined ways forward through the critique.

Organizations

Reading Soumitra, I found myself (maybe wrongly) associating his organizations with representationalism, vanguardism, statism, parties, NGOs, unions, military structures, maybe even classes (insofar as classes are misleadingly defined as structures instead of processes).[1]

But I also sensed a well-justified fascination with the part that some orthodox institutional structures have played in moments of wider revolutionary change. For example, Soumitra asks whether the encounter with old leftist rigidities was not a key part of the ancestry of the “oppositional knowledge” of contemporary Zapatista indigenous movement-building (pp. 9-11). He also writes that “it is surely not a coincidence that the municipalist revolution in Rojava by the stateless Kurds, led predominantly by women,” was also “initiated by what originally was an orthodox Marxist-Leninist formation” – “supported by an armed militia” to boot.

I reckon there are plenty more examples, whether from the Indian subcontinent, the Andes or wherever. I think of rural Thailand, where – countering all the prevailing nationalism, royalism and authoritarianism – one can still find today the marks of the thinking of the grassroots militants who, incognito, journeyed on foot back and forth across the borders of all the countries of the region 50 years ago and more, helping to make a history that remains mostly unrecorded. Many of those revolutionaries, for sure, were deeply in the grip of those dread “vanguardist” and statist ideologies. Yet their legacy was a resolute left internationalism that is one of the few political currents in the country that remains immune to the exceptionalism, chauvinism and racism that the country’s elites have successfully used to prop themselves up since colonial times.

Maybe the interesting topic is not so much the potential of structured organizations themselves as that of the sparks that are thrown off when they rub up against swiftly-moving processes of historical resistance.

Events

Soumitra is understandably impatient with things like “Twitter revolutions” (p. 6), which he sees as shallow, easily commodifiable reactions devoid of political content, unrooted in either past or future. But here too I see signs, heartening to me, that he might draw back from an unqualified dismissal of the importance of any transient event that might seem on the surface to be spontaneous, merely anarchic, or not built to last (p. 11). 

Of course, Soumitra’s overall suspicions about “spectacles” (pp. 6-7, 9) are well-founded. And there’s nothing historically new about “spectacular” events of “opposition” actually ending up reinforcing that old “state-capital.” I remember Ashish Nandy’s descriptions of how colonialism produces “not only its servile imitators and admirers but also its circus-tamed opponents and its tragic counterplayers performing their last gladiator-like acts of courage in front of appreciative Caesars.”[2]

Still, I would love to encourage any hesitations Soumitra might have about rejecting out of hand the significance of supposedly “spontaneous” events. Such a rejection, I think, would run the risk of overlooking the genuinely thick, “oppositional” substance in the recognizable type of spectacular political event exemplified by the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Standing Rock, the election of a black US president, or the sudden demise of a Soviet state that “was forever, until it was no more.”[3]

Not to mention the importance of more everyday outbursts in which oppositional “hidden transcripts” of the oppressed,[4] underground legacies accumulated over centuries,[5] or crystallizations of long experience around the dust grain of a fresh concept like “sexual harrassment” (to take an example from the early 1970s)[6] suddenly become public, often triggering startling new mobilizations.

And maybe even, at the extreme, the significance of, say, certain seemingly super-trivial Hollywood-type spectacles, like the scene in the homophobic, male-stupidity movie Dude, Where’s My Car? in which the hetero character played by Aston Kutcher “delivers the lingering tongue” to his buddy Seann William Scott. One stunned gay activist critic claimed that this scene “did more to advance the cause of homosexuality than 25 years of gay activism.”[7]

All these events – wildly diverse as they are – share the “peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as [they happen].”[8] In many of them, a “dimension explodes from within a particular context” or “lifeworld” that “is directly experienced as universal”.[9] Just because they are “spectacular” and fleeting doesn’t mean they have no relation to what is “organized,” enduring, or irrevocable (p. 11). Often the fruit of months or decades of officially unrecorded experimentation and rehearsal in the “arts of not being governed,”[10] they can be key moments in political struggles.

Skeptics might well remind us that the collapse of the USSR was followed ultimately by Vladimir Putin; Tahrir Square by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood; the fall of the Wall by a neoliberal surge and a resurgence of neo-fascism; the election of a black US president by increased inequality, more drone strikes and Donald Trump; and so on and so forth.

All true. But does it follow that spectacular “events” are never more than froth on the surface of “real” resistance? Or that such events cannot be moments in the formation of Soumitra’s “oppositional knowledge”? Doesn’t their official “unthinkability” itself suggest how political they are, how imbued with past and future time? Doesn’t the temptation to dismiss their significance run the risk of simply parroting the capitalist incantation according to which future events of this kind are impossible and past events of this kind never “really” happened?

Like Soumitra, I fear a future in which oppositional politics is reduced to gladiatorial contests, fantastical gestures, analysis-free declarations, state-friendly festivals of “alternatives,” and demonstrations that see no need for slow, error-filled, often tedious long-term alliance-building. But I fear equally any movement that disrespects the power of the unexpected breakthrough event as one form of distillation of and stimulus to revolutionary change.

Horizontality

I find Soumitra’s questioning of programmatic horizontality equally provocative. But this time I feel like I might want to invite him to be maybe even more provocative than he already is.

To get a preliminary observation out of the way: I don’t imagine that Soumitra’s somewhat allergic reaction to the fetishization of “horizontal” structures comes about because he is a big fan of hierarchy. I don’t think he has any nostalgia for the caricature rigidities of Leninism and Stalinism. I don’t believe that he would be very tolerant, either, of long-established “leftist” hierarchies like patriarchal anti-racism, white supremacist feminism,[11] or technocratic, anti-indigenous environmentalism.

In fact, I would like to think that Soumitra’s critique is due at least in part to the fact he senses, as I do, yet another state-capital hierarchy – although a hidden one – right inside many ostentatious celebrations of “horizontality”.

For me, the problem with horizontality is that it is too much like verticality. Verticality means that somebody stands over somebody else. But horizontality does too, insofar as the “matrix” or “tapestry” that enables people to be “horizontally” related is defined and validated from above. If we’re looking to do our bit to support the formation of Soumitra’s “oppositional knowledge,” the last thing we want to do is to try to subsume, replace or devalue the myriad complex relations among resistance movements encountering and trying to respect one another in favour of a blanket relation of “horizontality.”

Groups or movements related “horizontally” are on the same plane. But who made and manages that plane, and who reduces those movements – whether ubuntu, ecofeminism, buen vivir, or degrowth – to dots, threads or bits of embroidery that can fit together properly on it? If we don’t watch out, the master weaver of this “tapestry of alternatives” may become invisible. So too may all sorts of already-existing possibilities of revolutionary solidarity among movements that the state and capital are already trying to reduce to just such dots and threads. The techno-politics of “information” that dates from the mid-20th-century computer revolution is an additional, but usually unacknowledged, force linking this invisibilization with the rhetoric of “horizontality.”

Pretending to react against hierarchy and universalism, in short, horizontality tends in some ways to reinforce both. Most of us seek to avoid the unconsciously authoritarian presuppositions of cultural relativism, but mightn’t we be risking a return to the same path by going all out for “horizontality”?

A Hint from Gustavo

Gustavo’s allusion to the struggles of the Tojolabʼal people of Chiapas in his paper “New Political Horizons: Beyond the ‘Democratic’ Nation-State” (p. 22) offers an opportunity to make some of these points more concrete.

Bringing Tojolabʼal practice into imaginary dialogue with Soumitra’s paper might be a fertile move for several reasons. First, the Zapatista territory that Tojolabʼal and many other practices help shape is a place that much occupies Soumitra’s thoughts. Its relevance to big questions about social movements is obvious to him, as it is to Gustavo and many of the rest of us as well.

Second, the Tojolabʼal as Zapatistas arguably represent a living retort to a particular kind of old-leftist mythology that falls obediently into line with standard rightist fantasies involving development, progress, and bogus political “realism.” According to this mythology, we shouldn’t waste too much time thinking about “little” resistances like that of the Tojolabʼal because, however picturesque and praiseworthy they may be, they are after all just residual “pockets” of opposition[12] fated to be absorbed soon by the state or wiped out by the invincible onslaught of capital’s Other. One variant of this narrative – call it the Jared Diamond drama – goes looking for “collapsed” or “extinct” civilizations that can demonstrate how futile it is to resist humankind’s inevitable penchant for war against nature unless you deploy the understanding of “ecological limits” that is now fortunately provided by modern capitalist science. The ancient Mayans are one of the bit players called up from Central Casting to play this tragic role of a “disappeared” people. No doubt much to the amusement of living Mayans like the Tojolabʼal.[13] 

Third, the “oppositional knowledge” of Tojolabʼal arguably speaks directly to Soumitra’s issues of organizations, events, horizontality and the state. As I understand it, Tojolabʼal does not offer itself to capital, the state, or the intelligentsia as a “countable” organization, system, community, “language” or “alternative” located among “items” of similar status on the post-17th-century “international” plane of horizontality generated largely by the imperial nation-state.[14] Instead, as became increasingly evident to the rest of the world after the notably spectacular “events” of January 1994, Tojolabʼal and similar practices resist the state as a long, continually-evolving process that involves subsistence and survival but also organizing (as opposed to organizations), alliance-building, and a particular kind of respect.

It’s usually in the details of particular cases that the texture and potency of what Soumitra calls “oppositional knowledge” become perceptible. It seems to me relevant to an understanding of Zapatista anticapitalist resistance that you are not tojolabʼal by race or community. You’re not tojolabʼal because the language is your mother tongue. Instead, being tojolabʼal signals a commitment and an expectation. Because the concept ʼabʼalsignifies “heard” language, and tojol “fulfilling its vocation,” you fulfill your vocation as tojolabʼal when you know how to listen in a particular way.[15] European practices of “speaking” a language are implicitly opposed here. In tojolabʼal you can’t say “I speak” without at the same time saying “you listen (and will recast and correct me from the perspective of another, which I take account of in advance).”

Carlos Lenkersdorf stresses the “linguistic” aspect of this politics: instead of a sentence consisting of a subject, an object and a verb, you have two sentences with two subjects, two verbs and no objects, and so on.[16] But for me what this aspect of tojolabʼal also calls to mind is a wider global vista of practices that have also come to be “oppositional” in Soumitra’s sense. One example is what the Japanese critic of nationalism Naoki Sakai calls the “heterolingual address”: a stance that enables one to relinquish final authority over “what one oneself means.”[17] With the heterolingual address, you come to grasp your own meanings or beliefs through engaging in dialogue with others, facilitating a solidarity that is grounded not on homogeneity but on a process that allows for distance, including distance from oneself. This stance opposes what Sakai locates in modern history as the “homolingual” regime of translation[18] entrenched by 18^th century imperialism, which is today reproduced in the “international world” consisting of commensurable nation-states. Another example of such “oppositional knowledge” capable of linking different movements is what the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveires de Castro identifies as a distinctively Amazonian mode of translation that “produces difference” in a process of “controlled equivocation” – “controlled in the sense that walking is a controlled form of falling.”[19]

Closely connected with oppositional Tojolab’al “listening” is the “we-ification” of the “I” that Gustavo refers to. At the centre of medicine as practiced in the Zapatista context are the “names of our (living) body” – “our head”, “our eyes” – and not the “parts of the (dissected, individual, dead) body.” The habit of visiting and listening/speaking to our cornfield daily and being in our house is an aspect of health and human anatomy. As in many indigenous and peasant societies, similarly, it is not the individual criminal but rather “one of us” who commits the crime, and it is a collective responsibility to restore the integrity of a community that strives to include the “criminal.”[20] By the same token, the fact that “everything lives”[21] – including pots, clouds, stones, fire, and in a generalized way, “dead” ancestors – and have familial “we-ized” relations (with indigenous Mesoamericans commonly referring to themselves as the “children of maize”) is profoundly oppositional to commodification processes pursued by Mexican and US state-capital.[22] If, as Soumitra suggests, old-style Marxist thinking forms an indispensible part of the evolution of Zapatista practice, so, arguably, does the oppositional listening of tojolab’al.

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References

[1]     E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class,” Social History 3 (2), 1978,pp. 133-165.

[2]     Ashish Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, second edition, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1983]. Nandy’sidea was to refocus studies of colonialism on the nonspectacular “non-players, who construct a West which allows them to live with the alternative West, while resisting the loving embrace of the West’s dominant self” (p. 14).  

[3]     Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

[4]     James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

[5]     Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso, 2019.

[6]     Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp.159-60; Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, Dial Press, New York, 1990.

[7]     Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 58-69.

[8]     Michel-Rolph Triollot, quoted in Susan Buck Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 50.

[9]     Slavoj Zizek, Violence, Profile Books, London, 2009, pp.129, 133-34, 217-18. See also Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, London: Verso, 2009 and Zizek, Event: A Philosoophical Journey through a Concept, London: Melville House, 2014.

[10]   James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

[11]   Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (6), 1991, pp. 1241-1299.

[12]   This pernicious, militaristic idiom (“occupying army units mopping up remaining pockets of resistance”) can be heard at one time or another during nearly every leftist or environmentalist gathering in the global North. It is misleading and undialectical especially in that the supposedly vanishing “pockets” it refers to are in fact indispensible to capital as the source of all surplus value.

[13]   Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, And The Aftermath Of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. See also Liza Grandia, Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.

[14]   Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 7 and Sakai, “Translation”, Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2-3), 2006, 71-78. On countability see also Donald Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Ernest Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 433-446.

[15]   Carlos Lenkersdorf, Aprender a escuchar: Enseñanzas maya-tojolabales, Plaza y Valdés, Mexico, D. F., 2008, pp. 60-61.

[16]   Ibid., pp. 62-63.

[17]   Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, p. 7.

[18]   This is a “regime of someone relating herself or himself to others in enunciation whereby the addresser adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to the general addressees, who are also representative of an equally homogeneous language community.” People can “believe themselves to belong to different languages” yet “still address themselves homolingually” (Sakai, op. cit., pp. 3-4).

[19]   Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití 2 (1), 2004, pp. 3–22, p. 18.

[20]   Lenkersdorf, op. cit., pp. 123-24.

[21]   Ibid., pp. 126-29.

[22]   This resistance does not amount to the proposal of “alternatives” to anybody, and may be incompatible with such proposals. Obviously, tojolab’al is not an “alternative” for Tojolab’al themselves. But neither can it be an alternative for capital, which is compelled to try to treat it as a source of surplus value from which it must in time move on. Nor can tojolab’al be an alternative for the state, as it rejects, for example, the practice of “resources” on which the state is based. Nor is tojolab’al a harbinger of “another world” that is “possible” along the lines of the slogan of the World Social Forum. Tojolab’al is not possible, but actual. Nor is tojolab’al a theory in the sense of an “alternative for intellectuals.” No such effort to promote tojolab’al as part of a “horizontal” tapestry, however well-intentioned, could ever do much to shed the legacy of the very statism that the Zapatistas resist.

One danger of “horizontalist” campaigns is that they risk erecting restricted kinds of supposedly “non-hierarchical” political relation between reified versions of this reality and reified versions of otherwise unrelated processes, including even commodification processes. Such improvised political relations are likely to be in tension with the much more complex, historically-rooted non-horizontal political relations that sustain resistance such as that of the Zapatistas. For example, some ecosystem service exchange proponents have learned to insist that their project is designed to respect the “rights of nature.”

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by Gustavo Esteva

In these pages, I explain why it is not possible to eliminate the despotic nature of the “democratic” nation-state. Recognizing its limits opens up the exploration of many options for the people to rule themselves.

Democratic despotism

Small groups of people have ruled themselves, freely formulating the norms of their ways of living and dying in their localized settings. This democratic idea has been in fact used as a principle of social organization from time immemorial in human history, in the most diverse cultures and circumstances. However, when any group begins to operate at a scale that is no longer proportionate to its political capacities, such a democratic idea transmogrifies into its opposite: despotic imposition.

Modern institutions are counterproductive to their stated aims, because they operate at a scale that leads inevitably to the betrayal of its raison d’etre, as Ivan Illich warned half a century ago. What he anticipated is entirely evident today. However, every betrayal is misconstrued: as mere defects of these institutions or their operators that can be corrected with techno-fixes or marginal reforms. The evidence that the health system produces illness and death, for example, is attributed to errors or to the need for reforms or improvements, not to the system itself.

“Democracy” illustrates well such counterproductivity. Today, corporations and politicians at their service, not the people, make primarily all social and political decisions everywhere. Corporations are in fact ruling the world. For Illich, political majorities are fictitious groups of people with very different interests, unable to reasonably express the common good. He explained why democracy will not be able to survive the use that corporations can give to law and democratic procedures to establish their empires. According to him, the modern nation-state has become the holding corporation for a multiplicity of groups, each of which serves its own interests; periodically, political parties gather shareholders to appoint a board of directors. In the face of disaster, institutions lose respectability, legitimacy and the reputation of serving the public interest.

Disasters are now the order of the day. The world we knew is falling apart around us every moment. Increasingly we are immersed in sociopolitical and environmental chaos, taking us beyond naked horror. Until recently, most people believed that the electoral procedure expressed—with honesty, transparency and effectiveness– peoples’ collective will. They also believed that representatives elected through the dominant procedures of the day were at the service of the people: their interests and well-being. The fact –almost always evident – is that things do not work that way. That fact was commonly attributed to circumstantial failures. Just as with every ritual, failures increase faith in the myth, rather than weakening it. If it does not rain, those who participate in the rain dance will dance with more intensity and fervor, without doubting the validity of the ritual. The ritual generates faith, not vice versa. Such has been the case, until recently, with “democracy”. Although some people still trust electoral procedures and their outcome, no longer do the majority. As Illich warned, most institutions have lost legitimacy, respectability and reputation of serving the public interest.

Two centuries ago, particularly in Europe, to substitute unbearable monarchies for a softer and more disguised despotism won out as more attractive. Out of a tacit acceptance of a lesser evil, however, a certain fascination gradually emerged in many places; the belief that the modern nation-state was truly democratic grew among a great number of people. They also believed that certain adjustments would remove its despotic expressions. Today, no one would seriously argue that in any democratic nation-state people rule their own lives. Today, the idea that this kind of sociopolitical organization is truly democratic appears as a gigantic hoax, a foolish illusion and an instrument of domination. It produces the opposite of what it promises.

The original sin and its consequences

The kind of “democracy” born in the West was openly contradictory with the democratic idea. “Democratic” Greek men fiercely discriminated against women and had slaves; they considered barbarians all people who neither spoke a Greek tongue nor had “moral qualities” similar to their own. For Aristotle, democracy, like tyranny or oligarchy, could never seek for the common good. He offered several arguments against any government by the majority.

The political regime that became the universal model for the modern nation-state was not conceived as democratic. The Federalists explained that it would be irresponsible to put the government of the American Union in the hands of “the people:” even if this category alluded only to white men. If “the multitude” had the power, the country would be controlled by demagogues who would, for their own interest, produce fragmentation: a group of small states instead of a Union would likely arise. Sharing Aristotle’s preoccupations, the American Founders conceived a regime, a republic, which kept power in the hands of a small elite group, with only certain limited functions granted to some sectors of “the people.” This republic began to be called democracy half a century later, when slavery was formally abolished. But neither the change of name nor the amendments to the original U.S. constitution eliminated the racist, sexist, classist character or the despotic nature of the regime.

The colonial seal of Western tradition was added to these traits to shape the nation-state. Particularly after the Enlightenment, Westerners assumed they had a “civility” of which certain classes and peoples lacked. They should thus be “civilized” for their own good, even through violent, brutal means.

 In the democratic nation-state, the power of the people is usually transferred to a small minority of the electorate, whose votes decide the party that will exercise the government. (No more than 25% of the electorate appoints the president of USA). A tiny group promulgates laws and makes all major decisions. “Political alternation” or “democratic checks and balances” cannot remedy such despotic operations.   

The undemocratic elements of all versions of “indirect” democracy constructed after the American model inspired in the 20th-century initiatives to make it less despotic. What has been called “participatory” or “direct” democracy, and many consider “populism”, include the initiative (that citizens directly submit bills), the referendum (the direct approval, by popular vote, of laws, policies or public decisions), the recall, consultations and other dispositives[1]. In certain cases, such as in Switzerland or California, USA, the number of issues on which they must vote, often without sufficient information or knowledge, annoys citizens. In other cases, as in Hungary, those dispositives are openly dictatorial instruments of “illiberal democracy”.

 The experience demonstrates the limits of this political regime. In no “democratic” nation-state are people actually ruling their lives, regardless of which “democratic” dispositives are introduced. The rule of a few prevails in all of them.

The despotism inherent to every form of “representative democracy” has thus become undeniable.

[1] I am using the Foucauldian notion of dispositive, a heterogeneous set of elements with a strategic function. For Agamben, it is “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” See the note in the Appendix.

The extinction of the nation-state and the exhaustion of capitalism

The modern nation-state took shape in 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia. The concept acquired its conceptual and political force during the French Revolution by combining it with nationalism, displacing or disqualifying previous concepts of state and nation. The nation-state, moreover, was soon perceived as the fullest embodiment of the industrial mode of production, which in turn was presented as the natural culmination of humanity: the zenith of progress.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the modern nation-state, the political form of capitalism, both the idea and its practical implications, were strongly criticized. However, no critique broke its hegemony over academics, intellectuals and large sections of the society.

In the course of its evolution, capitalism operated in all sorts of dictatorial regimes, but the democratic nation-state was preferred for the operation of the “free market”. In spite of the worldwide vocation of capitalism, expressed in all forms of colonialism, the nation-state always was the main arena for its expansion.

In the latter part of the 20^th century, however, national borders increasingly became an obstacle for capitalist expansion. Macro-national structures, designed for the free movement of capital and commodities, did not solve the problem. As a consequence, the substance of the nation-state began to dissolve. The main function of its governments, the administration of the national economy, became impossible: all economies are exposed to transnational movements that are beyond the control of each nation. While national rituals and the nation states themselves still persist as a general referent, their raison d’être along with the material substance giving them reality have disappeared.

The progressive dissolution of the democratic nation-state is also a consequence of the fact that capitalism has come up against its own internal limits. The political dispositives launched since the 1970s, as well as the technological “revolution” accelerated since the 1980s, dismantled social conquests accumulated over 200 years of workers’ struggle, affecting jobs, salaries, benefits and public services as well as economic growth. The highly concentrated and unprecedented accumulation of “wealth” in the last 40 years killed the goose laying the golden egg. The majority of what is produced today in the world still has a capitalist character, but capital can no longer resort to the mechanism that defines it: to invest profits in the expansion of production through purchasing labor and to compensate every increase in productivity that reduces labor through an equivalent increase in production. For these and other factors, the world reproduction of the capitalist system is no longer feasible.

Since the last decade of the 20^th century, economic and political leaders began to talk about a 20/80 world: once the technological revolution is completed, only 20% of the population would be necessary for production. This is a highly controversial statement. But what seems to be a reality is that a new social class has been created: disposable human beings. In the past, the unemployed fulfilled functions for capital: its industrial reserve army. Now and forever, the new class has no use for capital. Political and economic leaders are continually redefining the “surplus population”, accommodating in it new social categories. They continue asking themselves, time and again: “what can be done with the disposable 80%?” In increasing numbers, for the time being, they are exterminating many of them.

The system has slipped into barbarism. Speculation, dispossession and compulsive destruction are replacing production as a source of accumulation of wealth and power. The democratic façade no longer remains useful. From the old design of the nation-state, only the dispositives for direct or indirect control of the population remain. New technologies give to them previously unimaginable shapes.

The rule of law in democratic nation-states was the condensation of 200 years of struggle for civil rights and democratic freedoms. It is today being replaced by a declared or undeclared state of exception (emergency). Everywhere, new laws are used to establish illegality as a general norm and to guarantee national and international impunity for crimes that multiply. Instead of the rule OF law –common norms properly enforced- we are increasingly under the rule BY law.

 The dominant irresponsible forms of production and consumption have brought environmental destruction to extreme abuses of the most basic common sense. “Global warming” or “climate change” become mere euphemisms. The planet is on fire, not only the Amazon. The climate we had has been destroyed. We know nothing of the compatibility between human life and the emerging climate.

New forms of political domination are emerging. Fascism was a phenomenon bounded in time and space. It is no longer a “problem” of our time; labeling as fascist new authoritarian regimes like Orbán (Hungary) or Bolsonaro (Brazil), only creates confusion. We can now, however, derive relevant lessons from the fascist experience – as many of its features reappear in a different historical context. The appeal to patriotic emotions as a “raison d’Etat” has been reborn, across Europe and the United States. New nationalist discourses are no longer linked to authentic national projects; “Hungarian sovereignty”, Brexit or “Make America great again” are good examples of the new political use of patriotic emotions. The formation of a survivor consciousness is encouraged, with an implicit acceptance that there will be groups of people hopelessly doomed to disappear; everywhere, that role of the “to-be-disappeared” is being assigned mainly to migrants. People now cling onto leaders to whom messianic abilities are attributed—those singularly equipped to steady the ship—within a storm now dooming all. Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Modi or Johnson illustrate this process. People cling desperately to fundamentalisms—spiritual, religious, or political—as the ideas and institutions in which they trusted dissolve before their disbelieving eyes.

Political leaders with an open anti-democratic vocation and even fascist propensities are currently elected or re-elected, or at least ascendant. They pretend to embody the general discontent, promising to dismantle “the system”…  They fulfill their promise, once in power, by dismantling whatever “democratic” elements remained. They count upon a broad social base, especially among those most affected by the state of affairs, after convincing them that the authoritarian option is the best hope for remedying all their ills and discontent.

Almost everywhere, democracy is being “democratically” dismantled.

Radicalizing discontent

The 21^st century is now characterized by the proliferation of discontent, appearing in the most unexpected places. No space of social reality is immune. Even those who have concentrated an obscene proportion of wealth recognize the instability and dangers of the current state of affairs.

The rebel “spirit of the 1960s” appeared in many mobilizations of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Europe. The Alternative Forum in Berlin (1988), the Campaign of 500 years of Resistance (1992), the Counter-summit of the Earth (Rio, 1992), and the creation of Via Campesina (1993) illustrate reactions against the globalization of neoliberal capitalism and the New World Order. Most anti – systemic movements celebrate today the Zapatista rebellion (Chiapas, Mexico, 1994) for their awakening. The European marches of the 1990s, the creation of the People Global Action Against Free Trade and the WTO (Geneva, 1998), and popular movements like Reclaim the Streets, in England, illustrate the political climate of the period.

The 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, when nearly 40 000 protesters converged against the Millennium Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is often used as a reference point for the anti-globalization movement. Thereafter, all meetings of the WTO and many other international organizations face “counter-summits” strongly challenging them.

In the wake of the Battle of Seattle, new waves of popular demonstrations articulately expressed a diversity of discontents with the dominant system; particularly with representative democracy. “Let them all go!” said the Argentines in 2001. Ten years later, the Indignados, in Spain, pointed out sharply: “My dreams do not fit into your ballot box,” while the Greeks announced that they would not leave the squares they occupied until “they” were out. Occupy Wall Street stood strong in New York: “You have demands when you trust that governments can meet them. That’s why we don’t have them.” Since October 2018, the “yellow vests”, in France, radically reject all systems of representation.

Grassroots insurrections

For sheer survival or in the name of old ideals, common women and men at the grassroots, the salt of the Earth, are adopting new political horizons beyond the dominant political mentality. They are diverse expressions of societies in movement. The term that can better express what people are weaving at the grassroots is “radical democracy”. Going to the root of the democratic idea, “radical democracy” rejects equally the great paternal Leviathan and the great maternal society. The root of all legitimate democratic power can only be the people themselves. No dispositive that transfers or concentrates such power in any form of representation can be truly democratic.

While it remains impossible to characterize and classify effectively all initiatives being birthed, most of them share a common rejection of patriarchal, statist, capitalist, racist, sexist, caste-ist and anthropocentric roots of the dominant regime. Its common “NO!” opens to a plurality of “YESs!”, to radically diverse paths and life choices. Grassroots initiatives usually start in areas or aspects of everyday life in which the people can no longer get what they were getting before and where they can do something by themselves to deal with the new challenges. Those areas are conventionally associated with names that generate dependence and allude to contemporary “needs”: food, education, health… Common women and men are now recovering verbs that refer to personal and collective agency. Eating, learning, healing, dwelling…allude to autonomous ways of living, juxtaposing old traditions with contemporary innovations. Their attitude implicitly acknowledges that modern “needs” have been created by the dominant systems, in the tradition of the enclosure of the commons that gave birth to capitalism: the commoners, deprived of their commons to create private property, immediately need food, dwellings, jobs… They have become models of  modern “needy man”.

Eating

In these times of global fear, wrote the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano, “Whoever doesn’t fear hunger is afraid of eating.”[2] Hunger is again amongst us as almost one billion people are currently going to bed with an empty stomach. Famines forgotten since the middle ages are reappearing. More and more people are currently afraid of the toxic foods offered to everyone.

No solutions can be counted upon from the market or the State, the main perpetrators of both mass hunger and food toxicity. People need to do something to avoid starvation or to eat without fear… and they are doing it. People are taking back their kitchens and intestines from the control of corporations. Since 1996, Via Campesina, the largest people’s organization in human history, redefined food sovereignty: to define by ourselves what we eat … and to produce it. They defend these ideas in relevant fora, influencing public policy, while advancing autonomous food production and self-sufficiency. Small producers, mainly women, feed 70% of the world’s population today. Agribusiness, which controls more than half of the planet’s food resources, feeds only 30%.

There is an impressive multiplication of community gardens. Community spaces producing and distributing food for free proliferate. Havana illustrates well the potential of urban farming: 60% of the food consumed in Havana is produced right there. Arrangements between urban consumers and farmers, which apparently started in Japan and Germany, are now everywhere.

These examples are just the proverbial tip of the food iceberg. Grassroots initiatives with very modest beginnings are coming together and begin to have collective expressions that reflect an increasingly relevant conceptual and political shift. Old agrarian claims are retaken, next to a renovated relationship with Mother Earth, no longer transmogrified into a marketable commodity or “resource,” currently desecrated by public and private developers.

Learning

60% of children currently entering schools will not reach the level that their countries define as compulsory education; consequently suffering permanent discrimination. Those who manage to accumulate certificates after great effort and debt will face high unemployment rates. The market, moreover, doles out jobs with little or no relation to what has been studied. Dispersed and chaotic forms of education, through new technologies, severely affect the formation of children and youth.

People are resisting everywhere the dismantling of the education system that the governments call “education reform”. Countries that started their reforms long before the current wave –such as Finland- show interesting advances, while alternatives IN education also proliferate. Yet, alternatives TO education–autonomous forms of learning in freedom–are advancing even further. Millions of people, even billions, participating in such efforts, are not part of a movement in the conventional sense of the term. They are just courageously enjoying learning opportunities they create beyond the school system and the media, while generating new knowledge in non-conventional ways and participating in the generalized insurrection of disqualified knowledge.

Healing

The obvious failures of the health system and its iatrogenic effects are already supported with statistical evidence: doctors, medicines and hospitals produce more diseases than those they cure; prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death in the US and Europe. Every family has suffered cases of iatrogenesis. Such facts have intensified the efforts to reform the system, but fail to get very far. Even the “pursuit of health,” for many, has a pathogenic character.

The most interesting and effective initiatives are breaking from the dominant notions of health and disease and even body and mind, while nurturing autonomous healing practices and recovering familial and communal therapeutic traditions — avoiding any rigid fundamentalisms. Gradually they are shaping new institutional arrangements …while healing from “health.”

Dwelling

Public and private developments, producing urban and environmental disasters continue unabated; gentrification grows; homeless people multiply.

Simultaneously, self-construction practices are consolidated and strengthened; “cities in transition” proliferate; squatter movements are extended and new struggles bring to the city the spirit of those enacted in the countryside. Very diverse movements and initiatives resist the inertia of urban life and change dominant patterns. By reorganizing daily life, people recover self-mobility: on foot or by bicycle, restablish family life, strengthen communal spirit…and live again their own lives.

In all spheres of everyday life, people are manifesting new attitudes, well rooted within their physical and cultural contexts. An increasing number of people are adopting new political horizons as they change their habits and attitudes of exchanging, playing and loving. Practices such as the “social and solidarity economy”, still embedded in the dominant dispositives, contain organizational and conceptual elements with potential to generate radical change. These are efforts that gradually break with the dominant regime, although they remain exposed to continuous harassment; are still forced to use legal procedures and practices of the democratic nation-state; and depend on it in various contextual and practical aspects, like taxes, public services, traffic regulations…

Many of these grassroots initiatives go beyond “ecological conscientiousness”. They express an experience of relationship with Mother Earth associated with principles of respect and reciprocity. A new sense of responsibility is continually transforming producing and consuming habits, catalyzing the recovery of moral principles that have long been abandoned.

Friendships are being re-claimed, as their political nature becomes evident in the formation of new cells of social organization. Cariño becomes a political category, with a central place within new social relations that reject both the patriarchal and economic frames of society.

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives, an initiative that was made public in May 2019, aims to identify and link initiatives that challenge the dominant system at local, regional and national levels, encouraging mutual learning, solidarity, and political articulation. It intends to contribute to the formation of a critical mass of initiatives that are rebuilding everywhere collective life under new principles.

Reformulating democratic ideals

Grassroots initiatives all over the world are already a form of social existence that radically reformulates the dominant democratic ideal.

Beyond patriarchy

There is an increasing awareness that the very root of all dominant systems is to be found in thousands of years of patriarchy. Our patriarchal ways of being and thinking, expressed in our behavior patterns, have been “normalized”. It is necessary to challenge them in all their manifestations.

Patriarchy has always implied a hierarchical order, established by men, in which their control and domination operate under their assumption that their artificial constructions are better than living expressions; the latter must thus be destroyed and replaced. Ongoing initiatives recover a different narrative. They put the care of life at the center of social life and insist on the elimination of every hierarchy, every system of command, control and subordination, dismantling democratic despotism from its base.

Beyond development and the economic society

Many initiatives were born as forms of resistance or response to specific development projects since the 1950s. Today they are already beyond development itself — in all of its meanings. There is a rejection of the universal definition of the good life and the paradigmatic American way of life that defined the development enterprise since its birth. Since the 1980s, when international institutions declared a decade lost for development in Latin America, many people got the point. Based on the official figures of the World Bank in 1988, it was possible to estimate that the “poor” countries will catch-up with the rich in 497 years; that is, never. Alternative ways of thinking, like those associated in South America with the notion of buen vivir, lead to fully recovering your own ways; while challenging commodification and homogenization endemic within economic societies and the industrial mode of production. Initiatives beyond development leave behind the conventional notion of “needs” and “consumption”, aware of its modern, patriarchal and developmentalist root; reformulating in contemporary terms the spirit of the commonsin community entanglements in very different configurations. They establish a respectful and loving relationship with Mother Earth at the center of social life.

Economic societies are a quintessential expression of the patriarchal world. They have been organized on the logical premise of scarcity, assuming that the desires/needs/ends of humans are unlimited while their means/resources are limited. Therefore, a dispositive is required to allocate those limited means/resources to unlimited ends, to choose between butter or weapons…. The function of allocating resources is entrusted to the market in capitalism and to the plan (government, bureaucracy) in socialism; in reality, in all societies there is a combination of “market” and “plan” to allocate resources. Such functions define economic societies. Leaving their framework comes with adopting and embracing the premise of sufficiency; while trusting the gifts of natural abundance and abandoning the very notion of “resources”. As people are doing everywhere at the grassroots.

Beyond counterproductive arrogance

In the 1950s, Leopold Kohr warned that ongoing economic fluctuations had ceased to be business cycles; they had become size cycles. Economic activities, Kohr argued, had reached a scale beyond the possibility of human control. In response to every crisis, however, institutional efforts usually increase the scale of control, thus aggravating the very problems they intended to resolve. Instead of more centralization and unification, what is needed is to “cantonize” economic activities, insisted Kohr. Instead of waves of masses of water in the open sea, we need to act at the scale of ponds, because their ripples, no matter how agitated, can not achieve the destructive force of oceanic waves.

Mice the size of an elephant will collapse; a case of disproportionality. Likewise, elephants the size of mice will also collapse because of disproportionality. Proportionality is a central feature for both natural and social beings. Size and proportionality go hand in hand, but not mechanically. For the people to rule themselves, the group should have the political capability of looking together for the common good through consensus. This can be achieved by a group relatively big in Indigenous communities, used to the tradition of “we-ing”, but only pretty small groups of individualized urbanites can have such political capabilities, at least for some time.

People at the grassroots seem to know all this by experience and common sense. Instead of trying to construct dispositives or organizations of national or international scope, autonomous initiatives take care of what is within their reach. They construct collective and communal agreements that recover a sense of limits and proportionality. They are increasingly certain that global thinking is impossible. Only destruction can occur on a global scale.

Kohr’s classic proposal of breaking up nations to get them back to the human scale makes more sense than ever before. Studied in some think tanksand dissident groups, the idea still lacks enough popularity and feasibility. However, something equivalent is happening at the grassroots. Many people are no longer adopting national horizons to define their actions and initiatives. They are still forced to deal with national and international state apparatuses, but they are no longer relying on the nation-state as a legitimate or practical interlocutor.

Initiatives rooted in their physical and cultural contexts are conceived as alternatives to both localism and globalization. They are localized, but they are not locked into their contexts. While fully committed to those local contexts, they are open to other similar nuclei for bonding with each other. They act with a clear sense of proportion, taking serious account of forces and phenomena of global and national character that affect them, without adopting global perspectives to guide their actions.

As diverse initiatives collide and conjoin, it becomes necessary to construct stable forms for harmonious interaction at various scales. Options that avoid bureaucratic and centralized structures of power are being creatively considered and practiced for that purpose. The National Indigenous Congress of Mexico, for example, articulating thousands of disperse communities belonging to different peoples and cultures, with different languages, adopted the principle: “We are an assembly when we are together; we are a web when we are separated”. The Congress has been in operation for 25 years, without any central office, leaders or bureaucratic structures.

The critical point seems to be to reduce the need for coordination at a national or international scale.  At the grassroots, most people think that there is no need to define in advance a specific political embodiment, a certain doctrine or design, to orient collective efforts. Bridges are built when the time comes to cross them.

During September 6^th-11^th, 2019, a gathering took place in Iceland to reflect on different forms of radical democracy, with examples from different parts of the world. The participants discussed new political strategies of grassroots groups; particularly the diverse ways in which communities and movements can organize their collective defense in the present circumstances and interact harmoniously and convivially beyond local, regional and even national spaces. Members of very diverse networks and movements reflected intensely on democratic confederalism, libertarian municipalism and other political tools to interact, without abandoning the horizontality and democratic elements constructed at the grassroots.

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives and the Iceland meeting illustrate well the current efforts to find ways to link people’s initiatives, without building bureaucratic or representative structures, while avoiding doctrinarian dogmas or utopic promised lands.

New pathways

The efforts of an increasing number of people challenging dominant regimes, constitutes the opening to radically diverse new ways of living. They imply political attitudes that break with the conventional past but are supported in tradition and experience.

The “society as a whole” is always the product of a multitude of factors, phenomena and forces. It cannot be programmed, and strictly speaking, it is not even possible to think of it with any real meaning. The ongoing initiatives are not conceived with a general or global change in their horizon, but keep a sense of scale and proportion. They are also conceived with the conviction that what they are constructing will be, as the Zapatistas suggested, a world in which many worlds can be embraced. They leave behind all Leninist eagerness to be the avant-garde, leading the masses to some promised land. They intuit that the future has no future and that only institutions –obsessed with progress and development– have “a future”. They pack into the present as much past and future as they can, convinced that the survival of the human species depends on recovering hope as a social force.

The initiatives under way are shaped beyond reform and revolution. They use, instead, new stories that firmly sweep away the old myths and integrate past and present into a coherent set that may shed light on the steps to follow. They change their ways to change, transgressing cultural boundaries. They are creating new opportunities for emancipation and tracing the shape and limits of new ways of living.

They represent a renaissance of the democratic idea –people really and actually governing themselves- leaving behind its corruption incarnated in all modern and contemporary shapes of illusory “democracies” / “democratic” nation states.

The time has come, perhaps, to abandon the loaded word “democracy” and use another to identify and celebrate people’s direct, unmediated self-governance.

San Pablo Etla, September 2019

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Gustavo Esteva is a grassroots activist and an author of more than 40 books on economics, cultural anthropology, philosophy and education.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CLUES

(I am listing only the references I used directly in the essay)

Main references

Zapatistas. The Zapatistaexperience is both a theoretical and practical source of inspiration for this essay. Most of the Zapatista writing is available, in various languages, at: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx (09/28/2019)

Ivan Illich. In my view, he is more pertinent than ever. Reading his ‘classic’ pamphlets of the 1970s is particularly useful. (Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, Energy and Equity). For the themes of this essay, see particularly the last section (V. Political Inversion) of (1973) Tools for Conviviality.New York, Harper & Row. (I am using almost literally ideas expressed in pp. 102-109). The whole essay is inspired in some of his more important contributions, like the notion of counterproductivity, the political nature and role of friendship in social reconstruction, the critique of the industrial mode of production, going beyond reform and revolution, the sense of proportion and particularly interculturality.

Leopold Kohr. The theory of social morphology of Leopold Kohr is central for the approach of this essay.His classic The Breakdown of Nations is still very pertinent. See also (1979) Development Without Aid. The Translucent Society. New York, Schoken Books. I used for the essay specific formulations in an article published in El Mundo de San Juan in 1958, reproduced in Fourth World Review, 1992, 54, 10-11, as Size Cycles. See Ivan Illich, The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr. Available at: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-wisdom-of-leopold-kohr/ (09/28/2019)

Michel Foucault. I am following some of his main lines of thinking.The notion of the ‘dispositive’, central in his thinking, is also central in the essay. For him, it is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble, consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural planning, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic proportions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositive. The dispositive itself is the network that can be established between these elements.” (Foucault blog, April 1, 1977. (1977), 299: (1980) Dits et écrits. Paris, Gallimard, 194; (1980) The Confession of the Flesh, in Colin Gordon, Ed., Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York, Pantheon Books). 
See Agamben G. (2009) “What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays. Stanford, Stanford University Press. (The quote in the footnote is in p.14). See Gilles Deleuze, (1992) What is a dispositif ?, Armstrong, Timothy J., Michel Foucault Philosopher. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 159-169. See also Raffnsøe, S./ Gudmand-Høyer, M. and Thaning, M.S. What is a dispositive? Foucault’s historical mappings of the networks of social reality. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326518528_What_is_a_dispositive_Foucault%27s_historical_mappings_of_the_networks_of_social_reality. (09/28/2019) On the insurrection of subyugated knowledge see particularly (1980) Two lectures, 78-108, Colin Gordon Ed., quoted above.

Giorgio Agamben. I am using some of his approaches, particularly about the state of exception, the Foucauldian dispositive and the social conditions under capitalism. See in particular Agamben, G. / Attell, K. (2005). State of Exception. United States: Illinois, University of Chicago Press, and Agamben, G. (2019) Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism. Palo Alto, California, Stanford University Press. See also: Agamben, G. / Badiou, A. / Bennsaid, D. / Brown, W. / Nancy, Jean-Luc / Ranciëre, J / Ross, K. / Zizek, S. (2011) Democracy in What State. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press; (2015) Agamben, G. From the State of Law to the Security State. Available at: https://autonomies.org/2015/12/from-the-state-of-law-to-the-security-state-giorgio-agamben-on-the-state-of-emergency-in-france/ (09/28/2019). For the idea that future has no future, see (2012) “God didn’t die; he was transformed into money”, an interview with Giorgio Agamben –Pepe Savà. Available at: https://libcom.org/library/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-savà (09/28/2019)

Anselm Jappe. I am adopting the approach of Anselm Jappe and the Krisis Group about the current situation of capitalism, but I could not elaborate more on this theme and I don’t do proper justice to that approach. See, in particular, (2017) The Autophagic Society. Paris: La Découverte; (2005) Adventures of the Commodity: For a New Criticism of Value. Available at: http://thesecrethistoryoftheworld.com/new-south-wales/anselm-jappe-adventures-of-the-commodity-pdf.php (09/28/2019); Jappe, A / Latouche, S. (2015). Pour en Finir avec l’économie: Décroissance et critique de la valeur. Paris, Libre & Solidaire; Kurz, R. (1999). Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Frankfurt, Eichborn Verlag; Krisis-Group. (1999). Manifesto against Labour. Available at: http://www.krisis.org/1999/manifesto-against-labour/ (09/24/2019), Kurz, R. (2000) Against Labour, Against Capital: Marx 2000. Available at: https://autonomies.org/2016/11/against-labour-against-capital-marx-2000-by-robert-kurz/ (09/28/2019)

Gustavo Esteva. I did publish many of the main ideas of this essay, in English, in (1993) A new source of hope: the margins. Montreal, Interculture; (1995) “From ‘Global Thinking” to ‘Local Thinking’; Reasons to Go beyond Globalization towards Localization”, with Prakash, M.S. Osterreichische Zeitschirift fur Politikwissenschaft. 2, 221-232; (1996) “Beyond Global Neoliberalism to Local Regeneration: The International of Hope”, with Prakash, M.S. Interculture. XXIX, 2, Summer/Fall, 131, 3-52; (1998) Grassroots postmodernism: remaking the soil of cultures, with Prakash, M.S. London and New York: Zed Books; (1998) The Revolution of the New Commons, in: C. Cook and J.D.Lindau (Eds.), Aboriginal Rights and Self-government. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; (2001) The Meaning and Scope of the Struggle for Autonomy. Latin American Perspectives. 28, 2, 117, 120-148, March; (2001) Mexico: Creating Your Own Path at the Grassroots, in (2003) Benntholdt-Thomsen,V., Faraclas, N. and Von Werlhof, C. eds., There Is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization, Victoria: Spinifiex  Press/London and New York: Zed Books; (2007) Oaxaca: The Path to Radical Democracy. Socialism and Democracy, 21, July, 74-96; (2009) Another Perspective, Another Democracy, Socialism and Democracy, 23, 3, 45-60; (2010) The Oaxaca Commune and Mexico’s Coming Insurrection, Antipode, 42, 4: 978-993; (2010) From the Bottom-up: New Institutional Arrangements in Latin America, Development, 53, 1, March, 64-69.

Other references in alphabetical order by themes.

Capitalism

Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Boston, Profile Books.

Holloway, J. (2002). Changing the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. New York, Pluto Press.

Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism. New York, Pluto Press.

Holloway, J. (2016). In, Against and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures. Oakland, PM Press.

The 20/80 world and Tittytainment are associated with the first State of the World Forum, in the Fairmont Hotel, in San Francisco, 1995. Gorbachov, Bush, Thatcher, Havel, Gates, Turner, and many other leaders considered unavoidable the world 20/80. Zbigniew Brzezinski coined the word: tits and entertainment. A note on tittytainment available at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/stop-the-war/tittytainment-the-word-tittytainment-was-coined-for-the-first-time-in-1995-by-th/380342564403/ (09/38/2019)

Climate

McGibben, B. (1989) The End of Nature. New York, Random House. and (2019) Falter. Has de Human Game Played Itself Out. New York, Henry Holt and Co.

Democracy and social movements

Alvarez, S. / Escobar, A. (1992) The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and Democracy. Boulder, Co., Westview Press.

Archipiélago.This Spanish journal published a brilliant piece on democracy in 1992. I am using a few of its ideas. La illusión democrática. Archipiélago N.9. Reproduced in Opciones, 31, 19/03/1993, p.3.

Berry, W.“Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible”. (1991) Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse, The Atlantic Monthly, February, 61-63

Bishop, J. In a brilliant short piece he asked 30 years ago how it was possible to maintain that any of our societies are democratic, and posed all the pertinent questions.(1989) Democracy, Aristotle, Marx and the Contemporary Myth. State College, PA, Pennsylvania State University, Science, Technology and Society Program Transcript.

Cronin, Th. (1989) Direct Democracy. The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall. Cambrisge and London, Harvard University Press.

De Sousa, B. has been defending democracy and explaining how it has been democratically dismantled. See, in particular, De Sousa, B. (ed.) Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon. New York, Verso Books.

Escobar, A. (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, Duke University Press.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Global Tapestry of Alternatives. https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/es/ (09/28/2019)

Gutiérrez R. and others (2011) Palabras para tejernos, resistir y transformar en la época que estamos viviendo. Cochabamba: Pez en el árbol.

Hamilton, A. / Madison, J. and Jay, J. (2000) The Federalist. A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. New York, The Modern Library. See also (2002) Ellis, J.J., Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, Knopf; (2000) Jennings, F. The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. For a recent discussion of “sovereign immunity” (how the rulers are legally protected) see (2019) Justice John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflection on my First 94 Years. Boston, Little Brown.

Lummis, D. (1996) Radical Democracy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (See in p. 47 the estimate about the number of years required for the poor countries to catch-up with the rich countries.)

Nandy, A. wrote an excellent critical piece on the creation of the modern nation-statein (2010) 295-307, W. Sachs, ed. The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge and Power. London & New York, Zed Books. His bibliography mention both some the classics and very pertinent contemporary texts.

Tooze, A. (2019) Democracy and Its Discontents. The New York Review of Books, 66, 10, 52-57, 06/06/2019.

Via Campesina. https://viacampesina.org/en/ See https://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus for information about advances on food sovereignty.

Wilentz, S. (2019) No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Zibechi, R. has been closely observing the political scene in Latin America, particularly at the grassroots. See particularly (2019) Ramor, R. / Zibechi. R.  Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. Chico, Cal., AK Press; Zibechi, R. (2012) Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. Chico, Cal., AK Press; (2017). Movimientos Sociales en América Latina: el “Mundo Otro” en Movimiento. México, Bajo Tierra Ediciones. His column refers frequently to the themes of the essay. See particularly El fin de las sociedades democráticas en América Latina, La Jornada, 13/10/2017, available at: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2017/10/13/opinion/021a1pol Also Insurrecciones silenciosas, La Jornada 10/11/2017, available at: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2017/11/10/opinion/020a1pol

Development and postdevelopment

Alonso González, P., & Vázquez, A. M. (2015). An Ontological Turn in the Debate on Buen Vivir – Sumak Kawsay in Ecuador: Ideology, Knowledge, and the Common. Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 10(3), 315–334.

Altmann, P. (2014). Good Life As a Social Movement Proposal for Natural Resource Use: The Indigenous Movement in Ecuador. Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development, 12 (1), 82 – 94.

Escobar, A. (1994) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

Quick, J., & Spartz, JT (2018). On the Pursuit of Good Living in Highland Ecuador: Critical Indigenous Discourses of Sumak Kawsay. Latin American Research Review, 53 (4), 757–769.

Sachs, W. ed. (2010, 2d. edition). The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge and Power. London & New York, Zed Books. See in particular Sachs’ preface and introduction, my own piece on development, Vandana Shiva on Resources and Ivan Illich on Needs.

Patriarchal frame

Von Werlhof, C. (2013) Destruction through “Creation” – The “Critical Theory of Patriarchy” and the Collapse of Modern Civilization. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24, 4, 68-85.

Von Werlholf, C. (2015) Critical Theory of Patriarchy. Oaxaca, Mexico: El Rebozo Palapa Editorial.

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Gustavo Esteva is a grassroots activist and an author of more than 40 books on economics, cultural anthropology, philosophy and education.