ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento
2007-01-22
AmericaLatina
Images of Socialism
Raśl Zibechi
The controversy born in the heat of the recent proposal of President Hugo Chavez to create a single party of his supporters in Venezuela, which goes hand-in-hand with his initiative of building socialism for the 21st century, seems like a good opportunity to air a debate which is always valid and necessarily inconclusive about the other world to which many of us aspire. As Edgardo Lander, the Venezuelan sociologist, has pointed out, it turns out to be impossible to move ahead in the debate without making a balance-sheet of real socialism. For those of us who have formed themselves with the thinking of Marx, past and present experience of the “historical movement that is developing before our eyes” (the Communist Manifesto) is the unavoidable reference point for that debate.
The trajectories of many Latin American social movements have a direct relation with the metaphors to which Marx appealed to set out his vision of the revolution and the new world. He did not insist on formulating a “theory of the revolution”, as a good part of his followers attributed to him, but rather he limited himself to thinking on the basis of images – or parables if you prefer – born from concrete experience. His theoretical constructions sought to incite [reinforce] the real movement, not to indicate the only road without reference to time or history, valid for all times and all latitudes.
The [main] thread of [his book] the Paris Commune (on the civil war in France) reminded [us] that “the workers have no utopia ready to implant by decree of the people . . . they do not have to realize any ideals, but simply to let loose the elements of the new society that the old, agonized society carries in its breast”. On other occasions, he turned to the image of the revolution as a mid-wife; it is not the revolution that creates the new world, but rather “simply” helps it to be born. He never backed the State as the key to the construction of socialism -- an institution which he always considered as an obstacle on the road to emancipation.
Today, before our eyes, appear any number of practices for social change which are growing in the heart of the movements, from the Lacandon jungle to Patagonia. They are the original creations of portions of those other societies (of Indians [native peoples], the landless, the unemployed, the poor on urban outskirts) that are taking shape on the margins of the market and in contraposition to the accumulation of capital. In general, they do not respond to preconceived designs of this-or-that political current – “they are not based on ideas or principles invented by this-or-that reformer of the world”, as the Manifesto says; but rather they drink from the inexhaustible waters of cultures and traditions of those from below [the down-trodden]. And just as all of them are different, their creations are equallly diverse and dissimilar.
On the turf of the movements, which are often other societies in movement, practices of education, of health, of production emerge based on non-capitalist social relations. Workers in occupied factories who produce without foremen and reinvent forms of the division of labour which do not generate hierarchies; farm workers who create settlements which assume [based on] a true cultural revolution in rural life; Indians [native peoples] who recover their ancestral curative knowledge; the unemployed who invent goods which they exchange with others [who are] unemployed. In these spaces, education is often converted into self-education and, with that, acquires emancipating features dissolving the classic relation of subject-with-object which reigns in classrooms.
Anyone seeking to sketch the appearance that socialism will [may] have, needs no more than to observe these other worlds to capture features which are being drawn on a small scale, in any number of practices that are embryos of the new world. But the best is yet to come. We still do not know what socialism will [may] be because, fundamentally, it is taking shape in the different experiences of the oppressed to the extent that they release their creative potential. [And this is] completely contrary to the image so much appreciated by certain revolutionaries who assure [us] that “the path has been traced” and we only need to follow it.
Socialism understood as government ownership of the means of production and development of the forces of production failed spectacularly. The new world grows from the inside toward the outside and it expands horizontally, outside and against institutions. For the birth of that new society it appears necessary to count on an instrument like the state – force – organized violence – those forceps which help in “breaking the shell” to return to the images of Marx. Later the forceps should be discarded so that they not become an end in themselves which end up disfiguring the new world.
In Venezuela, socialism has two roads. Either it will be based on the thousands of initiatives of the down-trodden, in the more than 6 thousand urban land committees or in the 2 thousand water commissions, to name just two examples, where millions of people are taking charge of their lives; or it will be based on the state apparatus. In that case, the State [would] take charge of production, health and education, and in time, all aspects of life. It would become an ever-stronger State, more powerful [and] more centralized, that would form a society in its image and likeness: homogeneous, identical to itself, without space for difference and dissidence. That is a well-known road. With complete certainty, it leads to better standards of living for the population, but it has nothing to do with socialism or emancipation. The master-servant relation, one of the axes of the capitalist system and of the State, would occupy a dominant position.
This model has predictability in its favour. We know where it leads to, who holds the wheel and who follows the orders. On the other hand, the roads which lead to another world, what we could call socialism, are uncertain, unpredictable and must always be reinvented. There are no models. To my way of thinking, the most advanced experience of self-government of the down-trodden [the disposessed] exists today with the councils for good government, in Chiapas, where everyone learns to govern, thus dissolving the State. Far from being a model, they are little more than a point of reference, the tangible proof that it is possible to go beyond what exists, and the well-beaten path, which the history of more than a century has shown, produces intolerable forms of oppression.
Translation: Donald Lee
http://alainet.org/active/15178
|
|
|
[Página de búsquedas]
[Página principal]
[Main Page]
[Regresar]
Quienes somos | Área Mujeres |
Minga Informativa de Movimientos
Sociales
|
|