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

maherreraz@hotmail.com, presid.y.partic@gmail.com

“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.

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.

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[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.