[Marxism] Limits of Social Movements

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

 From Ethan Young

Introduction to 'The limits of social movements'

This essay made the rounds of Spanish-language left websites in 2004, 
and it caught my eye despite my pathetic grasp of the language. It deals 
with issues specific to Latin America but its framework suggests an 
approach to the question of the relation of social movements to the 
political left that has wider applications.

Since this is a problem that I believe is crucial for the US left, I 
used electronic translation and my language decoding skills (acquired 
when I worked at an academic book publisher) to produce this English 
version (with a lot of help from translator extraordinaire Ted Kuster).

Marc Saint-Upéry is a French journalist and sociologist based in 
Ecuador. He is read in France and in Latin America, but little of his 
work is available in English. He recently published a critical study of 
the 'left turn' of Latin governments, Le Rêve de Bolivar: Le défi des 
gauches sud-americaines [Bolivar's Dream: Challenge of the South 
American Lefts]. He questions the Chavez government in Venezuela, but 
even more so the left observers who characterize it as a breakthrough, 
"21st century socialism."

Folks can take his arguments or leave them – I have "conditionally" 
defended socialist governments over the years – but my interest is in 
Saint-Upéry's sharp analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of social 
movements as the main vehicle for radical social change.

The course of the 20th century, culminating in the collapse of the 
Soviet model in 1989-92, has taught a deeper appreciation of the 
fundamental importance of social movements (in contrast to command 
economies and vanguard parties) in generating radical reforms and a 
basis for the mass democratic alternative to capitalism commonly known 
as socialism. Saint-Upéry takes this as a starting point in analyzing 
the various mass social movements that have appeared in Latin America 
over the last two decades, which have offered new models of 
community-based power and raised the profile of landless agrarian 
workers, jobless urbanites, and indigenous peoples. (Since the essay 
appeared they also have played an important role in political 
developments, particularly in Bolivia.)

These movements are way beyond anything we've seen in the U.S. lately. 
The action of workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago gives 
just a taste of what has taken place in a number of Latin countries. Yet 
Saint-Upéry argues for caution in evaluating these developments. He 
takes on some of the most prominent intellectual proponents of casting 
these movements as new vanguards, including Raúl Zibechi, Anibal Quijano 
and Eduardo Galeano, as well as widely read non-Latin American radical 
theorists, including Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, John Holloway and James 
Petras.

The significance for the U.S. left comes in part from the fact that the 
proximity of Latin countries – geographically and, arguably, culturally 
– gives insight and foresight on what may develop in the U.S. as workers 
respond to the economic crisis. But the essay opens broader questions as 
well: Can social movements lead politically? Are they intrinsically 
revolutionary or even progressive? How do community-rooted moral and 
cultural concepts translate into political ideas in the broader society?

Saint-Upéry writes as a scholar, not an activist, and he was schooled in 
the French academic left of Lacan, Althusser and Bourdieu rather than 
the political left of revolutionary ideologies. Some concepts pop up 
which were new to me, particularly imaginary (as a noun), defined by 
Wikipedia as "the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common 
to a particular social group and the corresponding society"; and 
lifeworld, "the 'background' environment of competences, practices, and 
attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon" (as the 
concept was developed by Habermas). I did my best; if you don't savvy 
sociology jargon, good luck.

The url to the original Spanish is 
http://alainet.org/active/show_text_en.php3?key=7068

ey

----

The Limits of Social Movements: An untimely reflection

Marc Saint-Upéry

ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento
2004-11-05
Los Límites de los Movimientos Sociales: Una reflexión intempestiva

In the 1950s and 1960s, people in the French left sometimes avoided 
speaking certain truths (on the Soviet system, for example) so as to 
“keep hope alive in Billencourt”[1]  for the pro-Communist workers. 
While I do not share this Jesuitical conception of the truth, I offer 
these very incomplete and imperfect reflections on the limits of the 
social movements with no intention of denying hope to the militant 
cadres that work to construct and to fortify these movements. I intend, 
rather, to oppose the deceptive and unspoken fallacy that underlies a 
certain enthusiastic movimientismo, that in my opinion is an uncritical 
exaltation of the social movements, that is often just a cheap 
substitute for, and only barely disguises, the comfortable and 
monolithic certainties of Leninist or foquista [guerrilla] vanguardism. 
This fallacy takes a correct and extremely important premise – "without 
the social movements, nothing is possible" – and surreptitiously derives 
from it an invalid conclusion: "with the social movements, everything 
(or almost everything) is possible."

In calling a debate on the unanswered questions surrounding social 
movements, I wanted to concentrate on three subjects: the problem of the 
relation of social movements to politics; the relation between their 
"demographic" weight and their political weight; and the question of the 
"antisystemic" character, or the anticapitalist potential, of these 
movements.

The dilemma of politics

As soon as they take part in the dispute over the common good and the 
social order, social movements move openly and directly to politics and 
contribute to the definition of the political agenda. Nevertheless, the 
relation of the social movements with politics – much less politicians – 
is not usually understood in the sense of state institutions, public 
policy and electoral competitions. In the latest debates on social 
movements in Latin America, there was a certain tendency to presuppose 
the existence of an emphatic split between social self-organization and 
political institutions. This absolute dichotomy often reflects a 
slippery attempt at moralizing the strategic debate, and a new version 
of old fundamentalist impulses. Nowadays, the question is: just what is 
the revolution, who are the revolutionaries and the reformists, how best 
to distinguish the “pure” from the “impure” in order to defend the 
virginity of idealized social movements against any institutional 
contamination. The most extreme form of this purism is found in a 
curious book by John Holloway.[2] However, I believe that Holloway’s 
thesis is only the hyperbolic crystallization of a vague but insistent 
ideological mood that other authors offer in more qualified forms.

One of them is Raúl Zibechi, who has published an article on the 
"dangerous relations" between social movements and state power.[3] For 
Zibechi, the contrast between the brief and ill-fated governmental 
participation of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, once powerful and 
now debilitated by this experience, and the practice of electoral and 
institutional participation of theBrazilian landless movement MST, 
verifies that the real alternatives are constructed essentially outside 
state spaces, in the “stubborn autonomy” of social and community base 
areas. However, the reality is a little more complex. Like many social 
movements, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement was built in large part 
based on the political, institutional and symbolic reserves of the state 
– as well as those of the para-state or supra-state constituted by the 
multilateral and international cooperation agencies [non-governmental 
organizations]. Its real militance, although cyclical, could almost be 
characterized in the terms used by García Linera Alvaro to describe the 
old Bolivian labor movement: “a deep-rooted, accusing spirit confronting 
the state, bellicose certainly, but demarcated within the boundaries of 
meaning and modernization propagated by the state.”[4] In general, the 
diagnosis of Pablo Ospina applies: “The [Ecuadorian] Indian movement 
navigates between various options that interconnect, separate and 
diverge: to oppose the power of the state, to turn to the power of the 
state, to create more or less autonomous spaces of power inside the 
state.”[5] Yet these “separations” and “divergences” hardly ever break 
out between the spurious professional politicians and the heroic 
supporters of social mobilization; rather, the ambivalences of its 
relation with power systematically cut through every instance of a 
social movement, from the leadership to the base.[6]

At the heart of this mythical dichotomy between political power and 
social anti-power, there is, in Zibechi’s words, a noticeable confusion 
between two not necessarily congruent strategic options: a rigorous 
distancing from market competition and electoral obligations, as is the 
case with MST; and an actively driven, separate and autonomous 
institution, like the Zapatista “caracoles” [local government 
assemblies] (but not with the Ecuadorian indigenous municipalities, 
which promote participation within the framework of the prevailing 
legal-administrative order). But the situation on the ground in Chiapas 
is much more subtle. In a recent document, for example, Subcomandante 
Marcos, while fully supporting the autonomy and radical democratic 
practices of the Zapatista Good Government Assemblies, pointed out that 
they: (a) recognize the penal jurisdiction of the Mexican State; (b) 
have cooperative relations with many of the official municipalities with 
which they share territory; (c) maintain a communications channel with 
the state government of Chiapas through the Secretariat of Indian 
Peoples; (d) although “they do not think that the elections are in truth 
a path for the people’s interests,” they recognize the right of the 
administrators to participate in the official elections and are ready to 
facilitate the work of the electoral authorities on Zapatista turf.[7]

In addition, after some very stormy attempts, the Zapatista 
municipalities renounced the imposition of taxes in the territories 
under their control, to live essentially on international solidarity and 
cooperation.[8] Zapatista “counterpower” is kept in a curious ambiguity 
in the face of the coercive and expropriatory prerogatives that 
traditionally characterize state power. This ambiguity can be 
interpreted as a weakness, or as a fertile area of institutional 
innovation. It demonstrates, at least, that reality does not affirm the 
twofold schemes of the ideologists of counterpower or antipower.

The case of the Zapatistas is very particular for its creation of armed 
“self-limited” insurrection and its subsequent trajectory. In any 
context outside of pure coercion or institutional anarchy, the most 
general problem of social movements is that their essential “internal 
institutionality,”[9] while original and autonomous in form, cannot 
overlook “external” institutionality and the problems that it raises: 
Who holds sovereignty? Who is the legitimate representative? – and so 
on. The autonomy of social movements from the political-electoral 
market, especially its corrupt, “for sale to the highest bidder” 
versions, is indispensable. To believe, all the same, that this autonomy 
lessens the problems of the struggle for state power, of the contentious 
formation of the general will, of the institutionalization of the rules 
of social coexistence and of public deliberation, of the equitable 
administration of resources, of the representation of citizens and of 
their active participation in public matters, is the coarsest of illusions.

full: http://www.marxmail.org/limits_of_social_movements.htm

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu