This is the sixth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
There is a tendency to view the revolutionary process in Chile as limited to the period of the Salvador Allende government (1970-1973). Yet, this is a mistake, a mistake of perspective that limits radical change to state-centred agency. And if anything characterised the events in Chile, it was the relative autonomy of the transformations brought about at the time, an autonomy captured in the slogan, “popular power”; an autonomy struggled for before the Allende government and that would continue after the military coup d’état in 1973.
We share below two articles by the Uruguayan journalist and essayist, Raúl Zibechi, that help to place “Allende’s” revolution in a broader perspective, a perspective that provides a distance from a revolution driven by a leader to a revolution animated, in all of its diversity, from below. And we close with video recorded interviews, with Zibechi, in English and Spanish.
La Victoria, Chile: Half a century of building another world
La Victoria settlement in Santiago, Chile, recently observed its 50 th anniversary. It was one of the first organized occupations of urban land on the continent and in a half century built an alternative city, defied the dictatorship, and continues to find ways to break out of the neoliberal model.
Avenue 30 de Octubre proudly sports dozens of murals painted by the settlement’s brigades of muralists. To the visitor, they mark the arrival at a different neighborhood, distinguished by a population that made, and keeps on making, history.
« Do you see that window where the candle is ? » Macarena points toward a miniscule opening at the top of a modest home that is almost identical to the other self-built houses in the settlement. « That’s where Father André Jarlan died. A bullet killed him while he was reading the Bible, the very passage that says, ’Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ » [1]
Other testimonies say the priest was reading the De Profundis psalm [Psalm 130 : « Out of the Depths »] and even state the precise passage he was reading when he was killed by a bullet fired by the national police, or « pacos » as they are called in Chile. In any event, Father André Jarlan is part of the abundant mythology that surrounds La Victoria. His death occurred on Sept. 4, 1984, within the framework of a national protest against the Augusto Pinochet regime. That day police entered the settlement shooting into the air, as they did each and every time they entered the neighborhood after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup d’état. Upon learning of the priest’s death, thousands of people lit candles and marched to his home.
Thirty-three years after the coup, on Dec. 10, 2006, upon learning of Pinochet’s death, La Victoria was one big celebration. « Neighbors came out of their houses, embraced each other, and cried. They opened water faucets and doused themselves like in Carnival, shared wine, and danced, » recalls Macarena. In this battle-hardened neighborhood, few are the families without a relative killed, imprisoned, or disappeared by the military dictatorship.
A turn in history
The night of Oct. 29, 1957, a group from Zanjón de la Aguada, a five-kilometer by 100-meter belt of poverty in the center of Santiago with a population of 35,000, prepared to carry out the first organized, massive seizure of urban land. At 8 p.m., they began to dismantle their shacks, tied strips of cloth over their horses’ hooves to prevent making noise, and gathered « the three sticks and flag » with which to create the new settlement. Around 2:30 a.m., they arrived at the chosen site : a state-owned property in the southern part of the city. [2] « The darkness made us advance step by step. With the first light of dawn, everyone began to clear his piece of brush, build a hut, and raise the flag, » recalls one of the participants. [3]
The « encampment » withstood police eviction actions, and families began to build the settlement. From the first moment, they themselves defined the criteria they would follow. The construction of the settlement, which they called « La Victoria » [victory], was « an enormous exercise in self-organization by the settlers, » who had to « join forces and invent resources, putting into play every bit of knowledge and all their skills. » The government did not throw them out, but neither did it assist in the construction of the new settlement. [4]
The first aspect that distinguishes this action from previous struggles was its self-organization. The first night there was a large assembly that decided to create committees for neighborhood watch, sustenance, and health, among others. From then on, all important decisions were screened via collective debate. The second distinguishing aspect was its self-construction. The first public buildings, constructed by the settlers themselves, were the school and the health clinic, which reflected the inhabitants’ priorities.
For the school, each settler had to contribute fifteen adobe bricks ; women brought the straw, young people made the bricks, and teachers stacked them one on top of another. The school began to function within a few months of the camp’s establishment, although the teachers were not paid. The clinic began attending to residents under a tent until the building was erected, in the same way the school had been. Two years after the seizure, La Victoria had 18,000 inhabitants and more than 3,000 dwellings. As Mario Garcés remembers, it was a city built and governed by the poorest, based on a rich and extensive community network.
The « seizure » of La Victoria shaped a pattern of social action that was repeated with small variations during the following decades, and even up to today, not only in Chile, but throughout the rest of Latin America. The pattern consists of collective organization prior to the seizure, careful selection of a suitable space, and sudden action, preferably at night, along with the search for a legal umbrella of relations with churches or political parties, and the elaboration of a legitimizing discourse for an illegal action. If the seizure withstands initial eviction efforts by public forces, it is very likely the occupants will be able to remain. This pattern for social action put down its first steps in Santiago and Lima in the 1950s and was practiced in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the most « European » cities due to their homogeneity, only in the 1980s. This pattern is very different from individual families joining shantytowns known as « favelas, » « callampas, » and « villas miseria. » [5]
A new city
Land seizure « entails a radical break with institutional logic and with the fundamental principle of liberal democracies : property. » [6] Legitimacy takes the place of legality, and the land’s use value prevails over its exchange value. With a seizure, an invisible group becomes a socio-political subject. In La Victoria, something more happens : the construction of homes and the neighborhood by the residents themselves means the appropriation of a space by its residents that subsequently is inhabited by a « we » who become the area’s self-government.
This feature applies to all aspects of daily life. Not only did the inhabitants of La Victoria build their houses, streets, and water system, and install electricity, they also erected a health clinic and a school, the latter according to their own criteria, in that it is a circular building. They governed their lives and the whole area, establishing forms of popular power, or counterpowers.
Women played a prominent role, to the extent that many affirm that they left their husbands to go on the land seizure, or did not inform them of the crucial step they were about to take in their lives. « I went alone with my seven-month-old daughter, since my husband didn’t go with me, » recounts Luisa, who was eighteen at the time of the seizure. [7] Zulema, age 42, remembers : « Several women secretly came with their children, hiding from their husbands, like I did. » [8] Even in the mid-1950s, popular sector women—strictly speaking, we would have to say mothers, the women and their children—had a surprising level of autonomy. Not only did they take the lead during the occupation, but also when it came to resisting eviction and facing the police with their children.
Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar states that prior to 1950, popular sector women had learned to organize tenement house assemblies, tenant strikes, land seizures, health groups, resistance to police evictions, and other forms of resistance. In order to become « home owners, » they had to become activists and promote land seizures. This way, women settlers began to develop « a certain type of popular, local power, » that amounted to the ability to create free territories in which they practiced a « direct exercise in sovereignty » in truly autonomous communes. [9]
La Victoria was built as a community of sentiments and feelings, where identity is not anchored in the physical place, but in affections and shared life experiences. As the testimonies affirm, in the early days everyone called each other « compañero, » partly because everything was done by all of them. However, it was not an ideological comradeship but something more sobering : the November rains caused the deaths of 21 nursing infants. The death of a child is something special. In Brazil, when the landless occupy a property, they raise a large wooden cross. Each time a child from the camp dies, they drape a piece of white cloth on the cross and leave it there : it is something sacred. In La Victoria, when a child died, and sometimes an adult, a long caravan walked through the streets of the neighborhood before heading to the cemetery.
Prior to the 1973 coup d’état, the popular sectors were the main creators of urban space. In September 1970, the capital was in full transformation due to the encampments, which were « the most influential social force in the urban community of greater Santiago. » [10] Pinochet’s coup sought to reverse the almost hegemonic position attained by the popular sectors. That third of the capital’s population—those who had built their own neighborhoods, houses, schools, health clinics, and pushed for basic services—was a threat to elite authority. The military regime attempted to reverse the situation by displacing the entire population to places built by the state or the market.
Between 1980 and 2000, 202,000 « social housing units » were constructed in Santiago, in order to move a million people, one-fifth of the capital’s population, from self-built areas, to segregated housing complexes removed from the town center. An enormous mass of low quality housing was built for the poor all over the country. The regime first proceeded to « clean up » the rich neighborhoods, with a twofold objective : eliminate distorted property values created by settlements in the central sectors, and consolidate spatial segregation of the social classes as a security measure.
Urban specialists in Chile think that the dictatorship’s eradication of the poor from the consolidated city was a radical measure, singular on the continent. It would seem that the wave of mobilizations in those neighborhoods in 1983—after 10 years of fierce repression and social restructuring—convinced the elites that they should proceed with urgency, since the settlers were the protagonists of the massive national protests that put the dictatorship on the defensive. In 1980 there were new seizures that threatened to spread.
Women against Pinochet
Since 1983, settlements created by popular sectors after the seizure of La Victoria played a decisive role in resisting the dictatorship. The self-built, self-governed neighborhoods replaced factories as the epicenter of popular action. After 10 years of dictatorship, popular sectors defied the regimen in the streets by staging 11 « national protests » between May 11, 1983, and Oct. 30, 1984, led by young people who used barricades and bonfires to demarcate their territory.
From the early 1980s, women and young people began to rise in leadership through their pro-survival and socio-cultural organizations, and they reacted to the dictatorship’s attempts to dismantle the popular world. The appropriation of territories during protests, where barricades impose limits to state presence, has been the means to reject external authority within the self-controlled spaces. Heard often behind the barricades, referring to the national police, was : « They’re not passing here. » This effectively « closed off the population » and represented the « affirmation of the popular community as an alternative to state authority and rejection of the proposed totality of the dictatorship. » [11]
The state response was brutal. Slightly over a year later there were at least 75 dead, more than 1,000 wounded, and 6,000 arrested. In a single protest on Aug. 11-12, 1983, 1,000 were arrested and 29 killed ; 18,000 soldiers participated in the repression, in addition to civilians and national police. This underscores the intensity of the protests, which could have occurred only after a resounding community decision. Despite the repression, there was no defeat. Community identity was restored, and success was embodied in the very existence of the protests and in the ability to launch repeated and sustained challenges to the system for a year and a half following a decade of repression, torture, and disappearances.
Among the new actors, basically women and young settlers, some differences should be examined. The popular sectors, and in a very singular way, lower-class women, developed new abilities, the principal one being the capacity to produce and re-produce their lives without relying on the market, in other words, without following patterns. Gabriel Salazar states that, « If women’s experience in the 60s had been profound, that of the 80s and 90s was deeper still, causing an even more vigorous and integral social response. »
In the 80s, settlers did not organize just to take over a site and raise an encampment while awaiting state decree. « They organized among themselves (and with other settlers) to produce (forming bread-making collectives, laundries, weaving centers, etc.), to subsist (community kettles, family gardens, joint purchases), to educate themselves (women’s collectives, cultural groups), and also to resist (militancy, health groups). All this was carried out not only without the state, but also against the state. » [12]
Women’s strength, and this is characteristic of current movements across the continent, is based on something as simple as coming together, supporting each other, and resolving problems « their » way, using the infallible logic of doing things as they do at home, thereby transferring to collective space the same style as in private space, plus the spontaneous community attitude seen in movements such as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.
These women have modified our understanding of the term social movement. They did not create bureaucratic structures or ceremonies with the usual pomp and circumstance inherent in those institutions that are necessarily separated from their base. But they acted, and did they ever ! Under the dictatorship, Chilean women settlers became little ants that crisscrossed between and among area houses, meeting and chatting with all the neighbors. Their mobility allowed them to weave « neighborhood nets » and even community networks that made formal neighborhood board meetings unnecessary. [13]
The image of these poor women acting within their neighborhoods, moving around weaving territorial nets that are, as Salazar points out, « community cells, » is the best image of a non-institutionalized movement and of the creation of non-state power—in other words, neither hierarchical nor separated from the whole. With this also, a new way of making politics is born by the hand of new subjects who are not registered or included in state, political, or social institutions.
For these women the transition to democracy was a disaster. After 1990, with the return of the electoral process, they suffered a defeat they never had imagined. In other words : « The settler movement was not vanquished by the dictatorship on the battlefield the settlers chose, but on the field of compromise chosen by their supposed allies : middle class professionals and left-center politicians. » [14]
La Victoria today
At the Pedro Mariqueo Cultural Center in La Victoria, during preparations for the 12th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Primero de Mayo Radio station, I was able to personally confirm the level of autonomy of new residential organizations. One statement impressed me more than any other : « Our problem began with the [return to] democracy. » [15] This did not seem to be an affirmation of an ideological nature, just common sense that was shared, but not overly emphasized, by the approximately 30 people present.
The panorama presented by those at the meeting was worthy of analysis. The majority were young people, though some were older, and most were women. Each person was responsible for one radio program, and there was everything from hip hop to transvestites to laborers, Christians, socialists, punks, and people who did not define themselves. The diversity was enormous, almost as great as that in the population. In some ways, we could say that all those people are experiencing, on a small scale, harmony in diversity, social action in diversity, and resistance in diversity.
Upon leaving the Pedro Mariqueo Center, where the radio and library are located, I felt that the underdogs were preparing something big—they practice how the new world will be. The community television station, Channel 3, is nearby and is run by Cristian Valdivia, a painter, carpenter, and computer repairman—occupations that allow him to survive and dedicate time to his passion, community TV. Channel 3 has a range of nine kilometers and broadcasts from 6 p.m. to midnight, Thursday through Sunday. Twenty-four people maintain the « educational, informational, and recreational » station where neighborhood cultural and social centers have their own programming.
The channel does not receive external funding, only the support of members, groups that have programs, and some neighborhood shopkeepers. « We don’t ask the municipal government for anything, » says Valdivia. « We do what we can by using people themselves : that is, more than economic resources, we deal with human resources. » [16] Even children have their own program. The group wants to contribute to the creation of a network of community television channels throughout Chile, and they already loan their equipment to other areas.
After 50 years, it seems evident that in La Victoria, as in so many places in Latin America, social change is basically cultural change. For neoliberal governments, even those headed by progressive forces, autonomy and cultural difference are dangerous. In fact, La Victoria is an area where the state intervenes by dispatching the national police to keep residents under surveillance. Using crime and drugs as an excuse, the Safe Neighborhoods Program was enacted in 2001 under the Ministry of the Interior. The program uses funds from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and calls for police and social intervention in the « marginal » or « conflicted » neighborhoods. Nine areas have been affected, the first being La Legua, and the second, La Victoria.
The objectives of the plan are obvious when the authorities themselves admit that it aims to « combat crime and street peddling in downtown Santiago. » [17] In each area they seek to involve social organizations, particularly the neighborhood boards, and this results in a division between the people and the organizational centers. « We are watched by the police 24 hours a day. Any activity that occurs is supposed to be reported to the police, » says Valdivia.
Walking through La Victoria toward the home of the Little Sisters of Jesus, who worked with Father André Jarlan, we see truckloads of rifle-armed police on the corners. María Inés has us enter a small, modest, yet dignified house that is very similar to nearby houses, where the four nuns live. She serves us coffee and slowly describes her experiences in the south with the Mapuche communities. She speaks softly, often pausing, perhaps because she is well over 70 years old. When we ask her about La Victoria today, she lowers her gaze and makes a gesture that is somewhere between weariness and annoyance : « The cops must leave here. » And she ends by staring off into space or, perhaps, at the image of Jesus hanging next to that of Father André.
— Garcés, Mario. Tomando su sitio : El movimiento de pobladores de Santiago, 1957-1970 [Taking Their Place/Seizing Their Site : The Settler Movement in Santiago, 1957-1970]. Santiago : LOM, 2002.
— Garcés, Mario, et al. El mundo de las poblaciones [The World of the Settlements]. Santiago : LOM, 2004.
— Grupo Identidad de Memoria Popular. Memorias de La Victoria [Memories of La Victoria]. Santiago : Quimantú, 2007.
— Revilla, Marisa. « Chile : actores populares en la protesta nacional, 1983-1984 » [Chile : Popular Actors in the National Protest, 1983-1984]. América Latina Hoy (Salamanca), vol. 1 (1991).
— Salazar, Gabriel y Julio Pinto. Historia contemporánea de Chile IV : Hombría y feminidad [Contemporary History of Chile IV : Masculinity and Femininity]. Santiago : LOM, 2002.
[2] The first land occupation in Chile is documented in books by Mario Garcés and the work by the Grupo Identidad de Memoria Popular cited in the list of references.
[3] Mario Garcés, et al., El mundo de las poblaciones, p. 130.
The four decades that have passed since the « Worldwide Revolution of 68 »—a concept coined by Immanuel Wallerstein—seems like sufficient time to attempt to understand the direction taken from that moment on by the anti-systemic struggle in Latin America. In order to do that we must divert our attention from large epic events such as the Tet Offensive of the Vietnamese fighters, the May manifestations in Paris, and the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, just to recall three events that had an impact throughout the whole world.
The truth is that these three events do not account for all of the social and political energy that was circulating during those years. Thinking only about our continent, what must be added are the workers’ uprising in Córdoba—The Cordobazo of 1969—which forced the withdrawal of Juan Carlos Onganía’s military dictatorship ; the onslaught of the urban struggles in Chile, which modified the structure of cities and brought Salvador Allende to the presidency in 1970 ; the farmers’ struggles in the Peruvian mountains, which forced out the military government of Juan Velasco Alvaro, starting in 1968, to carry out the largest agrarian reform of that time period after the Cuban agrarian reform ; the impressive rise of workers and miners in 1970 in Bolivia who built a Popular Assembly, an organ with which they were able to contest the power of the dominant classes. In each country it is possible to include events and processes which can easily be linked to what has generically been merely referred to as « 68. »
Nevertheless, one must dig deeper in order to get to the bottom of the long-term changes that allow us to speak of a before and an after of those years. What remains if we take from ’68 the multitudinous protests on main avenues ? If we leave the colossal although fleeting events of that period ? Responding deeply involves us in a way of seeing the world differently than the hegemony, similar indeed to that which the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos practices. He maintains that, « The large transformations do not start from the top nor with monumental and epic events, but rather with movements that are small in form and that appear irrelevant for the politician and analyst at the top. [1]
These changes were not immediately made visible, but rather are spread out almost imperceptibly or through a progressive and ascending manner, from the periphery to the center, from remote rural areas to the cities, from daily life to recognized cultural forms. But they do not do it following European and North American sociology of analytical logic regarding « social movements. » That is, analyzing the « characteristics of the organizations » that develop « cycles of protest » that start when « social actors » take advantage of « the structure of political opportunities » to deploy « repertoires of social action » that allow them to reach their « objectives and ends » in an « interaction with the state » and its allies. It is difficult for us to understand what is occurring in the basements of our societies by following this conceptual road.
One of the most notable results of the events of ’68 is the revelation of those from below, or rather their differentiation and visibility, to later rehearse the uprising or insurrection from the lowliest depths to proclaim « that’s enough ! » Over time this evolved into the creation of another world, different from the hegemonic world. To see that, it is necessary to take a view similar to the one Marcos attributes to anthropologist Andrés Aubry, which implies going beyond the exterior and what is visible in order to understand the side of the people « that is closed off to the outside ». [2]
A new generation of struggles
The first thing that stands out is the birth in large numbers of a new breed of organizations that embody social causes that are different from those that up to that moment had taken center stage, such as student and trade union movements. Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, the CRIC (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca) was born in 1971 in Colombia, which later would contribute to the creation of the ONIC (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia). In 1972 Ecuarunari, the organization of mountain-dwelling Quichuas was created, which played a decisive role in the formation of the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). In 1973 the Tiahuanaco Manifesto in Bolivia was sent out by a group of students, teachers, and Aymara peasants, altering the history of social struggles by placing the issue of oppression next to exploitation, which up until that moment had been the exclusive focus. In 1974 The Indigenous Congress of San Cristóbal de las Casas took place in Chiapas, where for the first time diverse Indian languages interconnected with one another and thus overcame old divisions. All of these were initiatives linked to the indigenous and peasant worker world, which in those years was struggling to become independent from both church and state. The following years saw the onslaught of associations of a new class : The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in 1977, became the hinge and turning point for the new trade unions and Argentina piqueteros. Toward 1979 landless peasant workers in southern Brazil—whose organizational experience had been brutally severed by the dictatorship that came to power in 1964—started the first occupations of what would later be called the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) ; that same year the « Katarista » current that rose up from the Tiahuanaco Manifesto was able to form an autonomous center, the Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers Unions (La Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia). These organizations grouped together long periods of construction and growth, but also served as trampolines for new advances that only time could unveil.
With all the new details that these movements took into account, it was nonetheless a first step. Unlike what happened when it was the party who had a leading position at the head of the movement, there was a strong dose of autonomous action in this new wave of organizations, even with those that converged with political organizations. And now we are before a new age that has produced a reaction that Wallerstein denominates an « endogenous illness » of the worker ; at the same time that they fight against the traditional enemies—imperialism, capitalism, and local elites—their reactions embody the limits of the old left : « We cannot understand 1968 without simultaneously considering it as a cri de couer against the evils of the world system and as a fundamental questioning of the opposition strategy of the old left against the world system. » [3]
In Latin America these new organizations started a multidimensional growth : they expanded their influence outward in a ripple-like manner, much like a rock tossed into a pond. Above all however, they started to stir the deep waters of social sectors that up until that moment had not made their voices heard independently. Instead, they had joined large conglomerates in which their voices were barely audible. Something that was occurring ever since the independence revolts was that these factions—popular, indigenous, and afro, not to mention women and other « minorities »—were risking their lives in wars that in the strict sense were not theirs.
What is true is that toward the 1970s, those who lived at the bottom of our societies started to construct their own organizations, without party, church, or strongman guidance. What’s more important, they started to make their voices heard using their own forms and manners. At the onset, they did it while appearing to respect the ways of the institutions, i.e. the hegemonic culture, but as they became more self-assured of their cause they started to demonstrate that they respected a different view of the world and were built upon different cultural bases. Of the Land
The fight for land is a common characteristic for all actors from below. The recuperation of land is a necessary step in the long and winding process of confrontation. Since we learned that the land was not the final objective but rather the first step, the logic of land ownership in which we are immersed at the beginning of the millennium becomes apparent, because « the fight for land is the fight for a determined territory. » [4]Millions of hectares were recovered by farm-workers and indigenous peoples both legally and illegally, by agrarian reform or through invasions and seizures.
Although it is a process that started out in rural areas at the hands of homeless Indians and farm-workers, it has also spread throughout the large cities of the continent, in those centers of capital domination where neighborhoods and even entire cities that somehow replicate the rural experience have started to take form. The self-determined construction of popular neighborhoods at the peripheries of large cities, as signaled by work on Ciudad Bolivar in Bogotá, is « the prolongation of the fight for land that for decades has covered the countryside of our country, expressed now in a city in the form of a struggle for housing. » [5] The protestors’ neighborhoods, with their retaken factories, such as the hills of Caracas, the peripheries of São Paulo, Asunción, Bogotá, and Lima, show the strength of the poor in urban territory.
The real divergence from previous time periods is the creation of territories : the long process of conformation of a social sector that can only be built while constructing spaces to house the differences. Viewed from the popular sectors, from the bottom of our societies, these territories are the product of the roots of different social relations. Life is spread out in its social, cultural, economic, and political totality through initiatives of production, health, education, celebration, and power in these physical spaces. As Bernardo Mançano points out, « A social class does not act out in the territory of another social class. » [6] Somehow, the territorialization of social subjects is a response to the territorialization of urban and rural capital. It is also a replica of the poor’s « accumulation through dispossession, » as geographer David Harvey interprets the neoliberal period, during which time capital tried to recover after the revolution of 1968.
For the first time in the history of capitalism a change was produced by which the workers were capable of causing the systematic crisis. Giovanni Arrighi tells us, « In previous hegemonic crises the intensification of the rivalry between the great powers preceded and structured the intensification from top to bottom of the social conflict, in the crisis of U.S. hegemony the latter completely preceded and configured the former. » [7] The crisis was provoked by « a wave of worker militancy » toward the end of the 1960s that « preceded and configured the crisis of Ford’s policies. »
This fact is fundamental in order to understand two issues of great importance : Options used by capital to overcome the crisis and the consequential options of the popular sectors. The elites dismantled welfare and let go all pretense of integrating the dangerous classes, betting on war as a way of earning. That is neoliberalism. The lower classes, more and more conscious of the fact that the objective of those in power is to get rid of them—at least entire portions of them, specifically the youth—are turning their open spaces into trenches. « It’s the poor’s strategic response to the crisis of old territoriality of factories and ranches, and capital’s reformulation of the old methods of domination. » [8]
I propose that in Latin America one differentiating feature of 1968 is the opening toward the territorialization of those involved : Indians, farm-workers, and popular urban sectors. However, the logic of territory is very different from that of the social movement. While one acts in accordance with the demands of the state, the other is « living space » [9]—characterized by the capacity to integrally produce and reproduce the daily lives of its members in a totality that is not unified but rather diverse and heterogeneous. Territory has a self-centered logic : although it formulates demands from the state it is not organized with this in mind.
While the forms of organization and the objectives and the construction of identities are the focus point for the social movement, the social relationships that are built upon the re-appropriation of land and the means of production are what are decisive for the « territories of emancipation »# [10] —not the production of merchandise but rather values that the whole community can use, because those social relationships are not capitalist. While the social movement triumphs when it achieves its demands, the territories triumph by consolidating and expanding every day, making those islands surrounded by capitalism « not a refuge for self-satisfaction but rather a small boat to navigate from one island to another and another … » as Marcos has pointed out.
The territorialization of subjects in revolt, which is really what is happening on this continent, forms part of a deep political and theoretical revolution. It is a new form of practicing change whose best exponents are the Zapatistas. Setting up territories creates sovereignty, autonomy, self-determination—in sum, self-government. It has to do with different societies than those that are born in the bosom of capitalist society in decline. The communities of the « caracoles » and people’s governing assemblies of Chiapas, the indigenous assemblymen of Norte del Cauca, the Aymara housing communities in the Bolivian Altiplano, but also the slums of El Alto and many other cities are different and diverse forms of popular self-governance. Although different and diverse with different levels of development, they are born, live, and fight to grow down and to the left.
Territories, power, revolution
The cultural-political process initiated by the rebellions of 1968 is also modifying the imaginary process regarding the transition to a new world. Save for a small number of people, few doubted that the key to the construction of a better society lay in the conquest of state power, be it through institutional means, insurrection, or after a prolonged war. But the territorial logic modified this image born with the French Revolution.
Although the Zapatistas were the first to explicitly formulate that they were not trying to take state power but rather construct a new world (which of course included the creation of other powers not in line with the State), this idea was already implicit in the form of construction that the most important movements of the continent had already adopted. The construction of territories in which non-capitalist social relationships are able to nest started a process whose focus is the creation of other powers, and not conquering state power. Thus a chance « return » to one’s origins is recorded. At the beginning of the socialist movement, it was Carl Marx who time and time again returned to the theme of transition, imagining it always as a chance « birth. » He defended the parable of social change in which the creation of a new world and revolution are two distinct entities, but not in the sense of those who propose a strategy in two steps—the seizure of power and then the construction of socialism—but rather something more complex and natural.
In The Civil War in France, upon evaluating the Paris Commune, Marx sustains : « The workers have no utopia that is ready to be implemented by the decree of the people (…) They do not have to achieve any ideals, but rather to set free the elements of a new society that the old antagonizing bourgeois society carried close to its chest. » [11] « Set free » or « liberér » is telling us that the new society already existed in its origin in the bosom of capitalism to some degree of development. That is why he also used the parable of birth. The revolution, as an act of force, forces the birth, sets free, and liberates that which already is living in an embryonic form so that it may continue to grow.
We can see these « elements of the new society » in the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas and in the shelters of Norte Del Cauca. And in an even more embryonic form, we can see them in thousands of landless settlements, in indigenous Aymara, Quechua, Mapuche, Ayamara, and tons of other native communities. We can also see them in very many urban peripheries. These are bits and pieces of the new world that must fight to grow. If the social movement continues to develop through resistance and struggle and through the non-capitalist social relationships that exist in the aforementioned territories, then capitalism will continue to dig itself deeper into crisis.
At some point « it will be necessary to break the chains » (Marx) that connect the capitalist social relationships. It will be a colossal fight, a true revolution that will contribute to the birth of the new world that the territorialized movements have been creating for a number of decades.
NOTES
[1] »Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, « Coloquio Aubry. Parte I. Pensar el Blanco, » San Cristóbal de las Casas, 13 de diciembre de 2007.
[3] Immanuel Wallerstein, « 1968 : el gran ensayo » en Arrighi, Hopkins, Wallerstein, Movimientos Antisistémicos, Akal, Madrid, 1999, p. 99.
[4] Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, « Territorios, teoría y política, » intervención en el Seminario Internacional “Las configuraciones de los territorios rurales en el siglo XXI, Universidad Javeriana, 25 de marzo de 2008.
[5] Corporación Taliber, « Potosí-La Isla. Historia de una lucha, » Bogotá, 1998, p. 9.
[10] Concepto acuñado por el geógrafo brasileño Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves.
[11] Carlos Marx, La guerra civil en Francia, Editorial Progreso, Moscú, 1980, pp. 68-69.
See also here for an interview with Raúl Zibechi for In Motion Magazine and, for a related discussion, an article by Steven S. Volk entitled “The Politics of Memory and the Memory of Politics”, published in NACLA (02/10/2013).
Chile: Changing scale/perspective
This is the sixth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
There is a tendency to view the revolutionary process in Chile as limited to the period of the Salvador Allende government (1970-1973). Yet, this is a mistake, a mistake of perspective that limits radical change to state-centred agency. And if anything characterised the events in Chile, it was the relative autonomy of the transformations brought about at the time, an autonomy captured in the slogan, “popular power”; an autonomy struggled for before the Allende government and that would continue after the military coup d’état in 1973.
We share below two articles by the Uruguayan journalist and essayist, Raúl Zibechi, that help to place “Allende’s” revolution in a broader perspective, a perspective that provides a distance from a revolution driven by a leader to a revolution animated, in all of its diversity, from below. And we close with video recorded interviews, with Zibechi, in English and Spanish.
La Victoria, Chile: Half a century of building another world
Centre Tricontinental, 20/01/2008
La Victoria settlement in Santiago, Chile, recently observed its 50 th anniversary. It was one of the first organized occupations of urban land on the continent and in a half century built an alternative city, defied the dictatorship, and continues to find ways to break out of the neoliberal model.
Avenue 30 de Octubre proudly sports dozens of murals painted by the settlement’s brigades of muralists. To the visitor, they mark the arrival at a different neighborhood, distinguished by a population that made, and keeps on making, history.
« Do you see that window where the candle is ? » Macarena points toward a miniscule opening at the top of a modest home that is almost identical to the other self-built houses in the settlement. « That’s where Father André Jarlan died. A bullet killed him while he was reading the Bible, the very passage that says, ’Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ » [1]
Other testimonies say the priest was reading the De Profundis psalm [Psalm 130 : « Out of the Depths »] and even state the precise passage he was reading when he was killed by a bullet fired by the national police, or « pacos » as they are called in Chile. In any event, Father André Jarlan is part of the abundant mythology that surrounds La Victoria. His death occurred on Sept. 4, 1984, within the framework of a national protest against the Augusto Pinochet regime. That day police entered the settlement shooting into the air, as they did each and every time they entered the neighborhood after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup d’état. Upon learning of the priest’s death, thousands of people lit candles and marched to his home.
Thirty-three years after the coup, on Dec. 10, 2006, upon learning of Pinochet’s death, La Victoria was one big celebration. « Neighbors came out of their houses, embraced each other, and cried. They opened water faucets and doused themselves like in Carnival, shared wine, and danced, » recalls Macarena. In this battle-hardened neighborhood, few are the families without a relative killed, imprisoned, or disappeared by the military dictatorship.
A turn in history
The night of Oct. 29, 1957, a group from Zanjón de la Aguada, a five-kilometer by 100-meter belt of poverty in the center of Santiago with a population of 35,000, prepared to carry out the first organized, massive seizure of urban land. At 8 p.m., they began to dismantle their shacks, tied strips of cloth over their horses’ hooves to prevent making noise, and gathered « the three sticks and flag » with which to create the new settlement. Around 2:30 a.m., they arrived at the chosen site : a state-owned property in the southern part of the city. [2] « The darkness made us advance step by step. With the first light of dawn, everyone began to clear his piece of brush, build a hut, and raise the flag, » recalls one of the participants. [3]
The « encampment » withstood police eviction actions, and families began to build the settlement. From the first moment, they themselves defined the criteria they would follow. The construction of the settlement, which they called « La Victoria » [victory], was « an enormous exercise in self-organization by the settlers, » who had to « join forces and invent resources, putting into play every bit of knowledge and all their skills. » The government did not throw them out, but neither did it assist in the construction of the new settlement. [4]
The first aspect that distinguishes this action from previous struggles was its self-organization. The first night there was a large assembly that decided to create committees for neighborhood watch, sustenance, and health, among others. From then on, all important decisions were screened via collective debate. The second distinguishing aspect was its self-construction. The first public buildings, constructed by the settlers themselves, were the school and the health clinic, which reflected the inhabitants’ priorities.
For the school, each settler had to contribute fifteen adobe bricks ; women brought the straw, young people made the bricks, and teachers stacked them one on top of another. The school began to function within a few months of the camp’s establishment, although the teachers were not paid. The clinic began attending to residents under a tent until the building was erected, in the same way the school had been. Two years after the seizure, La Victoria had 18,000 inhabitants and more than 3,000 dwellings. As Mario Garcés remembers, it was a city built and governed by the poorest, based on a rich and extensive community network.
The « seizure » of La Victoria shaped a pattern of social action that was repeated with small variations during the following decades, and even up to today, not only in Chile, but throughout the rest of Latin America. The pattern consists of collective organization prior to the seizure, careful selection of a suitable space, and sudden action, preferably at night, along with the search for a legal umbrella of relations with churches or political parties, and the elaboration of a legitimizing discourse for an illegal action. If the seizure withstands initial eviction efforts by public forces, it is very likely the occupants will be able to remain. This pattern for social action put down its first steps in Santiago and Lima in the 1950s and was practiced in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the most « European » cities due to their homogeneity, only in the 1980s. This pattern is very different from individual families joining shantytowns known as « favelas, » « callampas, » and « villas miseria. » [5]
A new city
Land seizure « entails a radical break with institutional logic and with the fundamental principle of liberal democracies : property. » [6] Legitimacy takes the place of legality, and the land’s use value prevails over its exchange value. With a seizure, an invisible group becomes a socio-political subject. In La Victoria, something more happens : the construction of homes and the neighborhood by the residents themselves means the appropriation of a space by its residents that subsequently is inhabited by a « we » who become the area’s self-government.
This feature applies to all aspects of daily life. Not only did the inhabitants of La Victoria build their houses, streets, and water system, and install electricity, they also erected a health clinic and a school, the latter according to their own criteria, in that it is a circular building. They governed their lives and the whole area, establishing forms of popular power, or counterpowers.
Women played a prominent role, to the extent that many affirm that they left their husbands to go on the land seizure, or did not inform them of the crucial step they were about to take in their lives. « I went alone with my seven-month-old daughter, since my husband didn’t go with me, » recounts Luisa, who was eighteen at the time of the seizure. [7] Zulema, age 42, remembers : « Several women secretly came with their children, hiding from their husbands, like I did. » [8] Even in the mid-1950s, popular sector women—strictly speaking, we would have to say mothers, the women and their children—had a surprising level of autonomy. Not only did they take the lead during the occupation, but also when it came to resisting eviction and facing the police with their children.
Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar states that prior to 1950, popular sector women had learned to organize tenement house assemblies, tenant strikes, land seizures, health groups, resistance to police evictions, and other forms of resistance. In order to become « home owners, » they had to become activists and promote land seizures. This way, women settlers began to develop « a certain type of popular, local power, » that amounted to the ability to create free territories in which they practiced a « direct exercise in sovereignty » in truly autonomous communes. [9]
La Victoria was built as a community of sentiments and feelings, where identity is not anchored in the physical place, but in affections and shared life experiences. As the testimonies affirm, in the early days everyone called each other « compañero, » partly because everything was done by all of them. However, it was not an ideological comradeship but something more sobering : the November rains caused the deaths of 21 nursing infants. The death of a child is something special. In Brazil, when the landless occupy a property, they raise a large wooden cross. Each time a child from the camp dies, they drape a piece of white cloth on the cross and leave it there : it is something sacred. In La Victoria, when a child died, and sometimes an adult, a long caravan walked through the streets of the neighborhood before heading to the cemetery.
Prior to the 1973 coup d’état, the popular sectors were the main creators of urban space. In September 1970, the capital was in full transformation due to the encampments, which were « the most influential social force in the urban community of greater Santiago. » [10] Pinochet’s coup sought to reverse the almost hegemonic position attained by the popular sectors. That third of the capital’s population—those who had built their own neighborhoods, houses, schools, health clinics, and pushed for basic services—was a threat to elite authority. The military regime attempted to reverse the situation by displacing the entire population to places built by the state or the market.
Between 1980 and 2000, 202,000 « social housing units » were constructed in Santiago, in order to move a million people, one-fifth of the capital’s population, from self-built areas, to segregated housing complexes removed from the town center. An enormous mass of low quality housing was built for the poor all over the country. The regime first proceeded to « clean up » the rich neighborhoods, with a twofold objective : eliminate distorted property values created by settlements in the central sectors, and consolidate spatial segregation of the social classes as a security measure.
Urban specialists in Chile think that the dictatorship’s eradication of the poor from the consolidated city was a radical measure, singular on the continent. It would seem that the wave of mobilizations in those neighborhoods in 1983—after 10 years of fierce repression and social restructuring—convinced the elites that they should proceed with urgency, since the settlers were the protagonists of the massive national protests that put the dictatorship on the defensive. In 1980 there were new seizures that threatened to spread.
Women against Pinochet
Since 1983, settlements created by popular sectors after the seizure of La Victoria played a decisive role in resisting the dictatorship. The self-built, self-governed neighborhoods replaced factories as the epicenter of popular action. After 10 years of dictatorship, popular sectors defied the regimen in the streets by staging 11 « national protests » between May 11, 1983, and Oct. 30, 1984, led by young people who used barricades and bonfires to demarcate their territory.
From the early 1980s, women and young people began to rise in leadership through their pro-survival and socio-cultural organizations, and they reacted to the dictatorship’s attempts to dismantle the popular world. The appropriation of territories during protests, where barricades impose limits to state presence, has been the means to reject external authority within the self-controlled spaces. Heard often behind the barricades, referring to the national police, was : « They’re not passing here. » This effectively « closed off the population » and represented the « affirmation of the popular community as an alternative to state authority and rejection of the proposed totality of the dictatorship. » [11]
The state response was brutal. Slightly over a year later there were at least 75 dead, more than 1,000 wounded, and 6,000 arrested. In a single protest on Aug. 11-12, 1983, 1,000 were arrested and 29 killed ; 18,000 soldiers participated in the repression, in addition to civilians and national police. This underscores the intensity of the protests, which could have occurred only after a resounding community decision. Despite the repression, there was no defeat. Community identity was restored, and success was embodied in the very existence of the protests and in the ability to launch repeated and sustained challenges to the system for a year and a half following a decade of repression, torture, and disappearances.
Among the new actors, basically women and young settlers, some differences should be examined. The popular sectors, and in a very singular way, lower-class women, developed new abilities, the principal one being the capacity to produce and re-produce their lives without relying on the market, in other words, without following patterns. Gabriel Salazar states that, « If women’s experience in the 60s had been profound, that of the 80s and 90s was deeper still, causing an even more vigorous and integral social response. »
In the 80s, settlers did not organize just to take over a site and raise an encampment while awaiting state decree. « They organized among themselves (and with other settlers) to produce (forming bread-making collectives, laundries, weaving centers, etc.), to subsist (community kettles, family gardens, joint purchases), to educate themselves (women’s collectives, cultural groups), and also to resist (militancy, health groups). All this was carried out not only without the state, but also against the state. » [12]
Women’s strength, and this is characteristic of current movements across the continent, is based on something as simple as coming together, supporting each other, and resolving problems « their » way, using the infallible logic of doing things as they do at home, thereby transferring to collective space the same style as in private space, plus the spontaneous community attitude seen in movements such as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.
These women have modified our understanding of the term social movement. They did not create bureaucratic structures or ceremonies with the usual pomp and circumstance inherent in those institutions that are necessarily separated from their base. But they acted, and did they ever ! Under the dictatorship, Chilean women settlers became little ants that crisscrossed between and among area houses, meeting and chatting with all the neighbors. Their mobility allowed them to weave « neighborhood nets » and even community networks that made formal neighborhood board meetings unnecessary. [13]
The image of these poor women acting within their neighborhoods, moving around weaving territorial nets that are, as Salazar points out, « community cells, » is the best image of a non-institutionalized movement and of the creation of non-state power—in other words, neither hierarchical nor separated from the whole. With this also, a new way of making politics is born by the hand of new subjects who are not registered or included in state, political, or social institutions.
For these women the transition to democracy was a disaster. After 1990, with the return of the electoral process, they suffered a defeat they never had imagined. In other words : « The settler movement was not vanquished by the dictatorship on the battlefield the settlers chose, but on the field of compromise chosen by their supposed allies : middle class professionals and left-center politicians. » [14]
La Victoria today
At the Pedro Mariqueo Cultural Center in La Victoria, during preparations for the 12th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Primero de Mayo Radio station, I was able to personally confirm the level of autonomy of new residential organizations. One statement impressed me more than any other : « Our problem began with the [return to] democracy. » [15] This did not seem to be an affirmation of an ideological nature, just common sense that was shared, but not overly emphasized, by the approximately 30 people present.
The panorama presented by those at the meeting was worthy of analysis. The majority were young people, though some were older, and most were women. Each person was responsible for one radio program, and there was everything from hip hop to transvestites to laborers, Christians, socialists, punks, and people who did not define themselves. The diversity was enormous, almost as great as that in the population. In some ways, we could say that all those people are experiencing, on a small scale, harmony in diversity, social action in diversity, and resistance in diversity.
Upon leaving the Pedro Mariqueo Center, where the radio and library are located, I felt that the underdogs were preparing something big—they practice how the new world will be. The community television station, Channel 3, is nearby and is run by Cristian Valdivia, a painter, carpenter, and computer repairman—occupations that allow him to survive and dedicate time to his passion, community TV. Channel 3 has a range of nine kilometers and broadcasts from 6 p.m. to midnight, Thursday through Sunday. Twenty-four people maintain the « educational, informational, and recreational » station where neighborhood cultural and social centers have their own programming.
The channel does not receive external funding, only the support of members, groups that have programs, and some neighborhood shopkeepers. « We don’t ask the municipal government for anything, » says Valdivia. « We do what we can by using people themselves : that is, more than economic resources, we deal with human resources. » [16] Even children have their own program. The group wants to contribute to the creation of a network of community television channels throughout Chile, and they already loan their equipment to other areas.
After 50 years, it seems evident that in La Victoria, as in so many places in Latin America, social change is basically cultural change. For neoliberal governments, even those headed by progressive forces, autonomy and cultural difference are dangerous. In fact, La Victoria is an area where the state intervenes by dispatching the national police to keep residents under surveillance. Using crime and drugs as an excuse, the Safe Neighborhoods Program was enacted in 2001 under the Ministry of the Interior. The program uses funds from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and calls for police and social intervention in the « marginal » or « conflicted » neighborhoods. Nine areas have been affected, the first being La Legua, and the second, La Victoria.
The objectives of the plan are obvious when the authorities themselves admit that it aims to « combat crime and street peddling in downtown Santiago. » [17] In each area they seek to involve social organizations, particularly the neighborhood boards, and this results in a division between the people and the organizational centers. « We are watched by the police 24 hours a day. Any activity that occurs is supposed to be reported to the police, » says Valdivia.
Walking through La Victoria toward the home of the Little Sisters of Jesus, who worked with Father André Jarlan, we see truckloads of rifle-armed police on the corners. María Inés has us enter a small, modest, yet dignified house that is very similar to nearby houses, where the four nuns live. She serves us coffee and slowly describes her experiences in the south with the Mapuche communities. She speaks softly, often pausing, perhaps because she is well over 70 years old. When we ask her about La Victoria today, she lowers her gaze and makes a gesture that is somewhere between weariness and annoyance : « The cops must leave here. » And she ends by staring off into space or, perhaps, at the image of Jesus hanging next to that of Father André.
Works Cited
— Fiamma, Paula. « Haciendo televisión participativa », entrevista a Cristian Valdivia [Making Participatory Television, Interview with Cristian Valdivia]. Nov. 2006. www.nuestro.cl/notas/rescate/cristi….
— Garcés, Mario. Tomando su sitio : El movimiento de pobladores de Santiago, 1957-1970 [Taking Their Place/Seizing Their Site : The Settler Movement in Santiago, 1957-1970]. Santiago : LOM, 2002.
— Garcés, Mario, et al. El mundo de las poblaciones [The World of the Settlements]. Santiago : LOM, 2004.
— Grupo Identidad de Memoria Popular. Memorias de La Victoria [Memories of La Victoria]. Santiago : Quimantú, 2007.
— Revilla, Marisa. « Chile : actores populares en la protesta nacional, 1983-1984 » [Chile : Popular Actors in the National Protest, 1983-1984]. América Latina Hoy (Salamanca), vol. 1 (1991).
— Salazar, Gabriel y Julio Pinto. Historia contemporánea de Chile IV : Hombría y feminidad [Contemporary History of Chile IV : Masculinity and Femininity]. Santiago : LOM, 2002.
NOTES
[1] Personal interview, April 2007.
[2] The first land occupation in Chile is documented in books by Mario Garcés and the work by the Grupo Identidad de Memoria Popular cited in the list of references.
[3] Mario Garcés, et al., El mundo de las poblaciones, p. 130.
[4] Mario Garcés, Tomando su sitio, p. 138.
[5] « Callampas, » as shantytowns are called in Chile, get their name from a mushroom that appears overnight, as they do.
[6] Grupo Identidad, p. 14.
[7] Grupo Identidad, p. 58.
[8] Grupo Identidad, p. 25.
[9] Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto, Historia contemporánea de Chile IV, p. 251.
[10] Garcés, Tomando su sitio, p. 416.
[11] Marisa Revilla, « Chile : actores populares en la protesta nacional, 1983-1984, » p. 63.
[12] Salazar and Pinto, p. 261. Bold emphasis in the original.
[13] Salazar and Pinto, p. 267.
[14] Salazar and Pinto, p. 263. Bold emphasis in the original.
[15] Personal interview, April 2007.
[16] Paula Fiamma, « Haciendo televisión participativa. »
[17] www.gobiernochile.cl.
The Revolution of 1968 : When the basement said enough!
Centre Tricontinental, 10/06/2008
The four decades that have passed since the « Worldwide Revolution of 68 »—a concept coined by Immanuel Wallerstein—seems like sufficient time to attempt to understand the direction taken from that moment on by the anti-systemic struggle in Latin America. In order to do that we must divert our attention from large epic events such as the Tet Offensive of the Vietnamese fighters, the May manifestations in Paris, and the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, just to recall three events that had an impact throughout the whole world.
The truth is that these three events do not account for all of the social and political energy that was circulating during those years. Thinking only about our continent, what must be added are the workers’ uprising in Córdoba—The Cordobazo of 1969—which forced the withdrawal of Juan Carlos Onganía’s military dictatorship ; the onslaught of the urban struggles in Chile, which modified the structure of cities and brought Salvador Allende to the presidency in 1970 ; the farmers’ struggles in the Peruvian mountains, which forced out the military government of Juan Velasco Alvaro, starting in 1968, to carry out the largest agrarian reform of that time period after the Cuban agrarian reform ; the impressive rise of workers and miners in 1970 in Bolivia who built a Popular Assembly, an organ with which they were able to contest the power of the dominant classes. In each country it is possible to include events and processes which can easily be linked to what has generically been merely referred to as « 68. »
Nevertheless, one must dig deeper in order to get to the bottom of the long-term changes that allow us to speak of a before and an after of those years. What remains if we take from ’68 the multitudinous protests on main avenues ? If we leave the colossal although fleeting events of that period ? Responding deeply involves us in a way of seeing the world differently than the hegemony, similar indeed to that which the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos practices. He maintains that, « The large transformations do not start from the top nor with monumental and epic events, but rather with movements that are small in form and that appear irrelevant for the politician and analyst at the top. [1]
These changes were not immediately made visible, but rather are spread out almost imperceptibly or through a progressive and ascending manner, from the periphery to the center, from remote rural areas to the cities, from daily life to recognized cultural forms. But they do not do it following European and North American sociology of analytical logic regarding « social movements. » That is, analyzing the « characteristics of the organizations » that develop « cycles of protest » that start when « social actors » take advantage of « the structure of political opportunities » to deploy « repertoires of social action » that allow them to reach their « objectives and ends » in an « interaction with the state » and its allies. It is difficult for us to understand what is occurring in the basements of our societies by following this conceptual road.
One of the most notable results of the events of ’68 is the revelation of those from below, or rather their differentiation and visibility, to later rehearse the uprising or insurrection from the lowliest depths to proclaim « that’s enough ! » Over time this evolved into the creation of another world, different from the hegemonic world. To see that, it is necessary to take a view similar to the one Marcos attributes to anthropologist Andrés Aubry, which implies going beyond the exterior and what is visible in order to understand the side of the people « that is closed off to the outside ». [2]
A new generation of struggles
The first thing that stands out is the birth in large numbers of a new breed of organizations that embody social causes that are different from those that up to that moment had taken center stage, such as student and trade union movements. Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, the CRIC (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca) was born in 1971 in Colombia, which later would contribute to the creation of the ONIC (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia). In 1972 Ecuarunari, the organization of mountain-dwelling Quichuas was created, which played a decisive role in the formation of the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). In 1973 the Tiahuanaco Manifesto in Bolivia was sent out by a group of students, teachers, and Aymara peasants, altering the history of social struggles by placing the issue of oppression next to exploitation, which up until that moment had been the exclusive focus. In 1974 The Indigenous Congress of San Cristóbal de las Casas took place in Chiapas, where for the first time diverse Indian languages interconnected with one another and thus overcame old divisions. All of these were initiatives linked to the indigenous and peasant worker world, which in those years was struggling to become independent from both church and state. The following years saw the onslaught of associations of a new class : The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in 1977, became the hinge and turning point for the new trade unions and Argentina piqueteros. Toward 1979 landless peasant workers in southern Brazil—whose organizational experience had been brutally severed by the dictatorship that came to power in 1964—started the first occupations of what would later be called the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) ; that same year the « Katarista » current that rose up from the Tiahuanaco Manifesto was able to form an autonomous center, the Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers Unions (La Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia). These organizations grouped together long periods of construction and growth, but also served as trampolines for new advances that only time could unveil.
With all the new details that these movements took into account, it was nonetheless a first step. Unlike what happened when it was the party who had a leading position at the head of the movement, there was a strong dose of autonomous action in this new wave of organizations, even with those that converged with political organizations. And now we are before a new age that has produced a reaction that Wallerstein denominates an « endogenous illness » of the worker ; at the same time that they fight against the traditional enemies—imperialism, capitalism, and local elites—their reactions embody the limits of the old left : « We cannot understand 1968 without simultaneously considering it as a cri de couer against the evils of the world system and as a fundamental questioning of the opposition strategy of the old left against the world system. » [3]
In Latin America these new organizations started a multidimensional growth : they expanded their influence outward in a ripple-like manner, much like a rock tossed into a pond. Above all however, they started to stir the deep waters of social sectors that up until that moment had not made their voices heard independently. Instead, they had joined large conglomerates in which their voices were barely audible. Something that was occurring ever since the independence revolts was that these factions—popular, indigenous, and afro, not to mention women and other « minorities »—were risking their lives in wars that in the strict sense were not theirs.
What is true is that toward the 1970s, those who lived at the bottom of our societies started to construct their own organizations, without party, church, or strongman guidance. What’s more important, they started to make their voices heard using their own forms and manners. At the onset, they did it while appearing to respect the ways of the institutions, i.e. the hegemonic culture, but as they became more self-assured of their cause they started to demonstrate that they respected a different view of the world and were built upon different cultural bases.
Of the Land
The fight for land is a common characteristic for all actors from below. The recuperation of land is a necessary step in the long and winding process of confrontation. Since we learned that the land was not the final objective but rather the first step, the logic of land ownership in which we are immersed at the beginning of the millennium becomes apparent, because « the fight for land is the fight for a determined territory. » [4]Millions of hectares were recovered by farm-workers and indigenous peoples both legally and illegally, by agrarian reform or through invasions and seizures.
Although it is a process that started out in rural areas at the hands of homeless Indians and farm-workers, it has also spread throughout the large cities of the continent, in those centers of capital domination where neighborhoods and even entire cities that somehow replicate the rural experience have started to take form. The self-determined construction of popular neighborhoods at the peripheries of large cities, as signaled by work on Ciudad Bolivar in Bogotá, is « the prolongation of the fight for land that for decades has covered the countryside of our country, expressed now in a city in the form of a struggle for housing. » [5] The protestors’ neighborhoods, with their retaken factories, such as the hills of Caracas, the peripheries of São Paulo, Asunción, Bogotá, and Lima, show the strength of the poor in urban territory.
The real divergence from previous time periods is the creation of territories : the long process of conformation of a social sector that can only be built while constructing spaces to house the differences. Viewed from the popular sectors, from the bottom of our societies, these territories are the product of the roots of different social relations. Life is spread out in its social, cultural, economic, and political totality through initiatives of production, health, education, celebration, and power in these physical spaces. As Bernardo Mançano points out, « A social class does not act out in the territory of another social class. » [6] Somehow, the territorialization of social subjects is a response to the territorialization of urban and rural capital. It is also a replica of the poor’s « accumulation through dispossession, » as geographer David Harvey interprets the neoliberal period, during which time capital tried to recover after the revolution of 1968.
For the first time in the history of capitalism a change was produced by which the workers were capable of causing the systematic crisis. Giovanni Arrighi tells us, « In previous hegemonic crises the intensification of the rivalry between the great powers preceded and structured the intensification from top to bottom of the social conflict, in the crisis of U.S. hegemony the latter completely preceded and configured the former. » [7] The crisis was provoked by « a wave of worker militancy » toward the end of the 1960s that « preceded and configured the crisis of Ford’s policies. »
This fact is fundamental in order to understand two issues of great importance : Options used by capital to overcome the crisis and the consequential options of the popular sectors. The elites dismantled welfare and let go all pretense of integrating the dangerous classes, betting on war as a way of earning. That is neoliberalism. The lower classes, more and more conscious of the fact that the objective of those in power is to get rid of them—at least entire portions of them, specifically the youth—are turning their open spaces into trenches. « It’s the poor’s strategic response to the crisis of old territoriality of factories and ranches, and capital’s reformulation of the old methods of domination. » [8]
I propose that in Latin America one differentiating feature of 1968 is the opening toward the territorialization of those involved : Indians, farm-workers, and popular urban sectors. However, the logic of territory is very different from that of the social movement. While one acts in accordance with the demands of the state, the other is « living space » [9]—characterized by the capacity to integrally produce and reproduce the daily lives of its members in a totality that is not unified but rather diverse and heterogeneous. Territory has a self-centered logic : although it formulates demands from the state it is not organized with this in mind.
While the forms of organization and the objectives and the construction of identities are the focus point for the social movement, the social relationships that are built upon the re-appropriation of land and the means of production are what are decisive for the « territories of emancipation »# [10] —not the production of merchandise but rather values that the whole community can use, because those social relationships are not capitalist. While the social movement triumphs when it achieves its demands, the territories triumph by consolidating and expanding every day, making those islands surrounded by capitalism « not a refuge for self-satisfaction but rather a small boat to navigate from one island to another and another … » as Marcos has pointed out.
The territorialization of subjects in revolt, which is really what is happening on this continent, forms part of a deep political and theoretical revolution. It is a new form of practicing change whose best exponents are the Zapatistas. Setting up territories creates sovereignty, autonomy, self-determination—in sum, self-government. It has to do with different societies than those that are born in the bosom of capitalist society in decline. The communities of the « caracoles » and people’s governing assemblies of Chiapas, the indigenous assemblymen of Norte del Cauca, the Aymara housing communities in the Bolivian Altiplano, but also the slums of El Alto and many other cities are different and diverse forms of popular self-governance. Although different and diverse with different levels of development, they are born, live, and fight to grow down and to the left.
Territories, power, revolution
The cultural-political process initiated by the rebellions of 1968 is also modifying the imaginary process regarding the transition to a new world. Save for a small number of people, few doubted that the key to the construction of a better society lay in the conquest of state power, be it through institutional means, insurrection, or after a prolonged war. But the territorial logic modified this image born with the French Revolution.
Although the Zapatistas were the first to explicitly formulate that they were not trying to take state power but rather construct a new world (which of course included the creation of other powers not in line with the State), this idea was already implicit in the form of construction that the most important movements of the continent had already adopted. The construction of territories in which non-capitalist social relationships are able to nest started a process whose focus is the creation of other powers, and not conquering state power. Thus a chance « return » to one’s origins is recorded. At the beginning of the socialist movement, it was Carl Marx who time and time again returned to the theme of transition, imagining it always as a chance « birth. » He defended the parable of social change in which the creation of a new world and revolution are two distinct entities, but not in the sense of those who propose a strategy in two steps—the seizure of power and then the construction of socialism—but rather something more complex and natural.
In The Civil War in France, upon evaluating the Paris Commune, Marx sustains : « The workers have no utopia that is ready to be implemented by the decree of the people (…) They do not have to achieve any ideals, but rather to set free the elements of a new society that the old antagonizing bourgeois society carried close to its chest. » [11] « Set free » or « liberér » is telling us that the new society already existed in its origin in the bosom of capitalism to some degree of development. That is why he also used the parable of birth. The revolution, as an act of force, forces the birth, sets free, and liberates that which already is living in an embryonic form so that it may continue to grow.
We can see these « elements of the new society » in the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas and in the shelters of Norte Del Cauca. And in an even more embryonic form, we can see them in thousands of landless settlements, in indigenous Aymara, Quechua, Mapuche, Ayamara, and tons of other native communities. We can also see them in very many urban peripheries. These are bits and pieces of the new world that must fight to grow. If the social movement continues to develop through resistance and struggle and through the non-capitalist social relationships that exist in the aforementioned territories, then capitalism will continue to dig itself deeper into crisis.
At some point « it will be necessary to break the chains » (Marx) that connect the capitalist social relationships. It will be a colossal fight, a true revolution that will contribute to the birth of the new world that the territorialized movements have been creating for a number of decades.
NOTES
[1] »Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, « Coloquio Aubry. Parte I. Pensar el Blanco, » San Cristóbal de las Casas, 13 de diciembre de 2007.
[2] Idem, « Parte VI. Mirar el Azul. »
[3] Immanuel Wallerstein, « 1968 : el gran ensayo » en Arrighi, Hopkins, Wallerstein, Movimientos Antisistémicos, Akal, Madrid, 1999, p. 99.
[4] Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, « Territorios, teoría y política, » intervención en el Seminario Internacional “Las configuraciones de los territorios rurales en el siglo XXI, Universidad Javeriana, 25 de marzo de 2008.
[5] Corporación Taliber, « Potosí-La Isla. Historia de una lucha, » Bogotá, 1998, p. 9.
[6] Bernardo Mançano Fernandez, idem.
[7] Giovanni Arrighi y Beverly Silver, Caos y orden en el sistema-mundo moderno, Akal, Madrid, 2001, p. 219.
[8] Raúl Zibechi, « Los movimientos sociales latinoamericanos : tendencias y desafíos, » en revista OSAL No. 9, Buenos Aires, Clacso, enero de 2003.
[9] Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, idem.
[10] Concepto acuñado por el geógrafo brasileño Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves.
[11] Carlos Marx, La guerra civil en Francia, Editorial Progreso, Moscú, 1980, pp. 68-69.
See also here for an interview with Raúl Zibechi for In Motion Magazine and, for a related discussion, an article by Steven S. Volk entitled “The Politics of Memory and the Memory of Politics”, published in NACLA (02/10/2013).