RETHINKING MARXISM CONFERENCE,
19-22 SEPTEMBER 2013.
THE
INTERNATIONAL GRAMSCI SOCIETY-SPONSORED PANELS
PAPER TITLE: PASSIVE
REVOLUTION, DEMOCRACY, AND SUBALTERNS IN COLOMBIA.
HEGEMONY AND THOUGHT OF RUPTURE (PART
I)
AUTHOR: MIGUEL ANGEL
HERRERA ZGAIB
ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR, CIENCIA POLÍTICA
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA
“Marx often
idealizes the working class, but here he makes it clear that they hold no
monopoly on dignity or virtue. Some of the most impressive voices in Capital
come from English factory inspectors, public health investigators, housing and
sanitary commissioners - middle –class civil servants who are not highly
competent, but “free from partisanship and respect for persons.” They
don´t have the power to transform
capitalism - only a revolutionary
mass movement led by the working class could do that - but
they are free to think and talk straight about it, to discover and
declare the truth about what it does to people from day to day.” Marshall
Berman (1999).The people in Capital,
in: Adventures in Marxism, p. 84.
A short homage
Very recently we got the news about Marshall Berman death, an
intellectual who joyously spent his precious life time to look into Marx,
Modernism and Modernization, and many other issues he put together to
originally think about the present and future of Humankind, in which destiny
there is always a central role played by the working class and the workers as a
whole. Firstly of all, by saying that, I
want to render homage to him, who I met when he was teaching at the Graduate
Center, CUNY, in New York, twenty years ago.
Taking into account
Antonio Gramsci legacy about whom Berman did not talk on details, there is a
common subject that both shared with Marx, to study the reality of work under
the grip of modern capitalism. This paper, Passive
Revolution, Democracy and Subalterns in Colombia, is centered in the
relationships between Subalterns, that is, classes and subaltern groups, and
actual democracy, on one hand, and how are they able to confront and overcome
the current passive revolution experience in Colombian capitalism, on the
other.
Preliminary
Remarks
La innovazione fondamentale introdotta dalla filosofia
della praxis nella scienza della politica e della storia è la dimostrazione che
non esiste una <> fissa e inmutabile (concetto
che deriva certo dal pensiero religioso e dalla trascendenza) ma che la natura
umana è l’ insieme dei rapporti social storicamente determinati, cioè un fatto
storico accertabile, entro certi limiti, coi metodi della filología e della critica.” Antonio Gramsci
(1996), La scienza della política, Note
sul Machiavelli, p. 10.
This
paper is part of my doctoral research in progress. Gramsci legacy plays a
significant intellectual influence and guidance on it. This doctoral work is
one that has experienced too many life contingencies, accompanied by thoughtful
doubts around the democratic process in Colombia during the past thirteen
years. Nevertheless, my relation with Gramsci rich opus goes by to the 70s.
That was a time
when I participated as a young militant of a leftist new organization, the Unión Revolucionaria Socialista, URS,
which aspiration was to be a point of political encounter between very
different Marxist groups, interested in create a party to lead a workers and
peasants revolution in Colombia.
Then I became
familiar with a couple of new names, Gramsci and Foucault among others. The URS
disappeared after five years of debates, intense militancy and electoral
defeats. Its end came with the imposition of the Estatuto de Seguridad, a dictatorial measure took by President
Julio César Turbay with support advice and support of the US government.
The Statute was
designed by Army commander, General Luis Carlos Camacho Leyva, a military and
lawyer, to repress and prosecute leftist movements and parties, who were
challenging the traditional political power of “El Frente Nacional” by all
means. This was not a glorious juncture marked as it was by missing, exiled and
tortured people in the military barracks of Usaquén (Bogotá).
After being out of
Law School due to a students strike asking for free speech and free
association, I retook Gramsci study focused on a new subject, the organic
Intellectuals and how to build a hegemonic connection with unionized labor on
behalf of working class people. In parallel we animated a cultural and
intellectual reform within the Universities too.
We organized El Círculo de Crítica Jurídica A.
Gramsci in la Universidad Libre. The idea was new in
all respects, and crushed with other left initiatives. In practical terms
brought us out of guerrilla war temptations, to question it as well as
political
representation.
We study Gramsci
Notebooks, organized by themes,[1]
and other publications in several subjects written before 1926, with special
emphasis on education, politics and cultural issues. But the main theoretical
concern was to disentangle what would mean Philosophy
of Praxis, and how it affected the ordinary way to understand and practice
Marxism in the conditions of Colombia and Latin America too.
In pursuing this
project, we were confronted by other groups and lefitst circles. They
identified Gramsci as a reformist, a thinker used by Euro-Communism to make
pacts with the bourgeoisie, and ultimately renounce the cause of revolution.
Salvador Allende close example was for them the reassurance, the symptom that
Colombian revolution would need the force of the guns as the last
argument.
All that happened 40 years ago. In the middle of these discussions and internal debates, we decided to participate in local politics, the elections in 1984 and 1986, affected for the division within the Liberal party and the successful political debut of Luis Carlos Galán and Nuevo Liberalismo. We were part of the civic movements that during the 70s demanded local democracy and good public services in urban areas.
All that happened 40 years ago. In the middle of these discussions and internal debates, we decided to participate in local politics, the elections in 1984 and 1986, affected for the division within the Liberal party and the successful political debut of Luis Carlos Galán and Nuevo Liberalismo. We were part of the civic movements that during the 70s demanded local democracy and good public services in urban areas.
The urban, popular
protest reached its political climax during the National Civic Strike led by the
main four workers organizations, CSTC, CGT, UTC and CTC, with the active presence of civic
movements, and parties and organizations from the left spectrum. The strike
lasted two days, 14 y 15 September 1977.
The multitude
confronted the treason of Alfonso López, president in 1974-1978, and founder of
Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal,
MRL. Earlier on he supported the Cuban Revolution, and established a political
alliance with the communists and Frente Unido, (the United Front), led by the
priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, chaplain de la Universidad Nacional.
López quickly
erased his progressive past. Instead he became the unlucky star of
Neo-liberalism in Colombia imposing the integral salary through a decree of
economic emergence.
He suppressed
“chucherías y abaloríos,” that is, the past workers conquests; abolished the
subsidies, freed the prices, and opened the “sinister window” to get the money
from the illegal economy. The subalterns and common people on strike named
López program: “El mandato caro” instead of
Mandato Claro that was his campaign slogan before his election.
During these years,
we became lawyers and founded a collective buffet, la Sociedad Juridica, offering advice services and practice Law. The
experience lasted 6 years. After that period of debate and political and
judicial practice, I went to Mexico to study a Master´s in Political
Science in the UNAM.
There I worked a research project based on Antonio Gramsci
legacy, and made contacts with scholars working on the subject. Particularly, a circle of social studies
animated by Francisco Piñón, a political philosopher who then published Gramsci: Prolegómenos. Filosofía y Política
among other books around Gramsci issues.[2]
Hegemony and Thought of Rupture.
“Tra I tanti significati di democrazia, quello piú
realistico e concreto me pare si possa trarre in conessione col concetto di
egemonia. Nel sistema egemonico, esiste democrazia tra il gruppo dirigente e I
gruppi diretti, nella misura in cui lo svilupo favorisce il passagio molecolare
dai gruppi diretti al gruppo dirigente.” Antonio Gramsci, Egemonia e
democrazia, Note sull Machiavelli, pp: 201-202.
A fundamental point
was not treated by Bujarin: how is the birth of a historical movement over
the infrastructure…At the end, this is the crucial point of all the problems
around the Philosophy of Praxis, and "without a solution for it there is not any
possibility to solve the other, that is, the relationship between society and
“nature,” Antonio Gramsci. Structure and Historical Movement, in: El Materialismo Histórico y la Filosofía de B.
Croce, p. 133. (Free translation).
The
intellectual horizon, when I retook the research on Gramsci, was the category
of hegemony to think about the praxis of the Subalterns in recent history of
Colombia after the nation state was built as a consequence of a period of
local, regional and national civil wars that came to an end in La Guerra de los mil días, and where the
subalterns were masses of maneuver attached to the oligarchic elites
leadership.
From it, I explored
the real meaning and projection of a singular crisis, the organic crisis, - based on Gramsci Notebooks -, a conceptual tool that allows me to recreate modern
politics as a science of praxis. I concentrated my analytical interest on
Gramsci historical reflection around Il
Risorgimento, Passato e presente, Gli Intellettuali e l´organizzatione della
cultura to compare Italy building of nation state with Colombia history of
XIX century and the first third of XX century.
Specifically, I
focused my initial inquiry in the period named Regeneración, when Colombia passed from being a federation to a
centralist, authoritarian constitutional republic. The radical elite was
defeated in the battlefield for a bipartisan force, Conservatives and Moderate
Liberals led by Rafael Núñez and Miguel Antonio Caro, the founders fathers of a
national oligarchic order.
That order lasted
almost hundredth years. But this order experienced a popular break in 1948.
That event marked the starting point of a long duration organic crisis, one
that has blocked for half a century the consolidation a non exclusionary
democracy, a real democracy with the direct and active participation of classes
and subaltern groups in Colombia.
It is useful to
remember in this regard that Gramsci was named the “theorist of the
conjucture,”[3]that
is, the analysis of situations which means to explore the interior
contradictory, antagonistic dynamic of
the events within the limits posted by the structural data articulated with the
efficacy of complex superstructures action.[4]
Here I captured and
applied in my research a conceptual turn represented by Gramsci critical
reading of Marxism, a break through a structural interpretation of Marx that
antecedes it. His contribution becomes a sort of Futur Anterièur within the scope of Philosophy of Praxis.[5]
In my
research project I worked on the notes grouped in two thematic
volumes, Il materialism storico e la
filosofia di Benedetto Croce, and Note sul Machiavelli sulla politica e sullo
Stato moderno. The end result of this analysis and interpretation combined
was to postulate that Gramsci recreated modern Political Science.
In Gramsci epistemological turn the central piece is hegemony, more precisely, crisis of
hegemony, a dynamic conceptual framework in accordance with the Philosophy of
Praxis, dictated by the defeat of the world revolution plan of the Third
International, and instead the rise of fascism and Nazism en Italy and Germany,
and the advent of Termidor period in the Soviet Union.
This conceptual
turn incarnates a rigorous way of looking how does thought of rupture help in
solving a problem, the failed democratic revolution in Colombia during the XX
century. Despite of how the subaltern classes and groups have been fighting for
their political autonomy in pursue of building a democratic society during the
short XX century, and the current century. That means to understand tout court
what is passive revolution and what is it reach in the era of proletarian
revolutions and global capitalism.
This democratic postponement
forced me to focus the doctoral research on Colombia to explain and interpret
how this political and social struggle from below against oligarchic
authoritarianism has been contested, and interrupted by the Colombian dominant
bipartisan bloc through successive phases of passive revolution.
I called this
episode a counter-reform, a democratic degeneration that has been functional
to a late capitalist formation during a 50 yearlong duration period.[6]
But this socio-historical delay aggravates the symptoms of a protracted organic
crisis which now exploits in the peasants revolt, and its national strike
against the government of President Juan Manuel Santos during the current year
2013.
The strategy of passive revolution extended to the
current government of Juan Manuel Santos, who currently invokes la Prosperidad democratic, and launched
the peace process with the subaltern guerrilla of Farc-Ep reveals a main
political goal, to build hegemony and not only domination over the subaltern
classes and groups. He wants to pursue
his political enterprise during this presidential period and the coming fourth
year in case of getting reelected in 2014.
[1]We use the Juan Pablos thematic edition on
Gramsci Notebooks published in Mexico. We did not get access to the new edition
by Valentin Gerratana during the 70s. It was only during the late 80s when we
got the first volumes published by Editorial Era in México. This edition was
interrupted when there was the collapse of Soviet socialism.
[2] PIÑÓN GAYTAN, Francisco (1987).Gramsci:
Prolegómenos. Centro de Estudios Sociales.
Ediciones Contraste. México, D.F.
[3] PORTANTIERO, Juan Carlos
(1982). Los usos de Gramsci. Editorial Folios. México, p.180.
[4] Op. cit., p. 181.
[5] Futur Antèrieur is the name of a left publication that Negri and other
intellectuals animated during his exile from Italy. It was the laboratory in
which Empire was collectively conceived without having any explicit kind of
dialogue with Gramsci legacy. Very recently,
Cesare Casarini, in Elogio de lo
Común, talks with Negri in regard to his intellectual and political
relationship with Gramsci.
[6] Colombia is part of a group of societies,
Argentina, Chile , Uruguay, Brasil, and México that Albert Hirschman named of
“late and last industrialization” to distinguish them from another group
integrated by Germany, Italy and Russia,
grouped as societies of “late industrialization”. But according to Portantiero,
Bolivia would be an off center case, in South America based on economic
grounds. And I added due to the fact that Bolivia intended an agrarian
revolution with the direct participation of its high organized proletariat in
1952.
