When faced
with a question, you are tempted to answer it quickly and thus get rid of it.
Once resolved, it would seem that tranquility has returned, now that it is
known that the question has been answered and that it will no longer haunt us.
But Bolívar Echeverría's question: To be on the left? He does not allow himself
to be quieted so easily.
You cannot
simply go to a list of characteristics that should be met, and this would be
enough. The question itself implies a position that is prior to the answer. Who
wonders what it means to be on the left? From what place of enunciation does he
do it? In what political context do you state this question? And, above all,
the mere acceptance of the validity of the question presupposes a position.
Underlying it is a restlessness that does not cease, a restlessness perhaps due
to the loss of an identity or not knowing exactly how to resist the system and
the constituted order.
It is
necessary to stop at the question, to allow oneself to be questioned by it and
to penetrate the interior of individuals and social subjects. Inside it digs,
stirs, and shakes off the accumulated dust of equivocal certainties about what
it means to be on the left; it forces us to put a question mark on the accepted
convictions about politics, strategies, and the meaning of social and political
organizations.
Of course,
Bolívar Echeverría takes the answer for granted: You have to be on the left!
But what does such a statement mean at a time when humanity is approaching
catastrophe? What implications sustain this commitment to being on the left?
What theoretical and practical footholds should be used in the search for a
coherent position?
The
political position adopted by Echeverría is framed in the character of the time
in which he writes. The main event that changed the course of history was the
fall of the Berlin Wall, which was the final collapse of bureaucratic societies
and the bankruptcy of the socialist project that ran through the twentieth
century. There, hopes for a better future and an alternative to capitalism
crash, and the slow but inescapable return of these societies to savage
capitalism begins. (Echeverría, El sentido del siglo XX, 2011) (Echeverría,
Vuelta de siglo (ensayos), 2018)
It is not
surprising that he was invaded by a certain despair, by the disappointment of
failed revolutionary processes, as Tinajero shows. It understands that
traditional responses are not enough, and while it maintains the revolutionary
perspective, it will seek alternative ways to move towards alternative
proposals that rearticulate the perspective of communist revolution. A detailed
overview of Echeverría's life, including the debates and his political
involvement both in his years in Germany and later in Mexico, can be found in
Gandler's Critical Marxism in Mexico: Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar
Echeverría. (Tinajero, 2011) (Echeverría, 1989, 2011) (Gandler, 2007)
The
question posed: Being on the left? It is framed in his conception of the
political and its difference with the alienated and repressive politics of
capitalism. The political acquires preeminence and is the foundation of human
sociality. Responding to the challenge of being on the left now involves first
fully understanding what this sphere of the political consists of and how
anti-capitalist resistance is formed from economic structures and not only as a
superstructural manifestation.
1.
Bankruptcy of the State, fracture of politics.
Echeverría's
starting point is the recognition of the State as the place where politics is
configured: "The national state gives modern political activity its
specific scenario or field of action." The system of representation
structured in parties, elections, and parliaments belongs entirely to the state
sphere. Within the State we do politics, and bourgeois institutionality imposes
this space as the only one where the will of the subjects can be exercised.
(Echeverría, ¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011, pág. 252)
However,
the national state has entered a phase of deep crisis, which is driven by the
demands of capital, which no longer has in it the guarantor of its expanded
reproduction. Capitalism wants to get rid of the state, to the extent that it
increasingly sees it as dysfunctional. As Echeverría says, capital contests the
State: "The national state is in crisis because, as the historical
pseudo-subject or "reflex subject" that it is, it is now seen and
experienced as disavowed by the real subject, by capital." (Echeverría,
¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011, pág. 253)
The
argument runs its course with all the logical force: the national state is the
place of politics; the national state is in crisis; therefore, politics loses
the space of action that sustains it, which is the state. The accelerated
deterioration of politics, which has been accumulating for decades, stems from
the split between the needs of capital and the forms of state domination. In
other words, democracy has ceased to be useful to capitalism and now demands
another way of imposing its designs. In this sense, the conclusion drawn is
truly radical: politics has become obsolete.
Now that
the national type of state presence of the subject-capital has become, if not
dispensable, at least questionable, also the way that it has been imposed for
several centuries of making a place for the political in the midst of social
life, of defining and delimiting what it is to "do politics," its
configuration of the world of modern politics has worn out and become obsolete.
(Echeverría, ¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011, pág. 254)
Echeverría's
reasoning advances like a steamroller that leaves nothing safe. For a very long
time the left has been acting on the stage of the national state, submitting to
its conditions, accepting its limits, and being trapped in the conditions of
doing politics that the state imposes on it. This has been the predominant
model of politics.
The
confusion that the left is going through originates in this ignorance of the
crisis of the State. The left does not perceive clearly enough that the space
of political action in which it acted is shattered and is no longer recognized
as valid by capital. The territory of battle has been moved to another place,
and the left is fighting the battles in a place where there is no war.
The left reproduces in its current bewilderment and inactivity the
decomposition of the environment in which it traditionally used to acquire
identity and of the social and political institutions of the State, the world of
"politics," in the figure in which it has prevailed for more than two
centuries. This sphere, medium, or world of politics derives its particular
consistency and shape from the existence of modern nation-states. The
decomposition in which politics currently finds itself reflects the radical
change that the foundation of the modern state has undergone throughout the
history of the twentieth century. (Echeverría, ¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011,
pág. 251)
In this
context, what happens to political parties? Party organization has been, and
continues to be, the model of political action par excellence. In the final
analysis, it is the political parties that carry the projects of the classes,
always within the rules of bourgeois institutionality. This is precisely what
Echeverría questions: although the parties expressed the will of the
bourgeoisie, this is no longer the case; power is exercised directly from the
economic sphere, and the sovereignty of the national state has long been
questioned.
It is not
surprising that Echeverría comes to the conclusion that the left cannot be
rebuilt through the formation of political parties, regardless of the model
that it has or adopts. It is not a question of what kind of political party is
considered valid for acting against capital, but that the political party form
is no longer effective for the purposes of communist revolution and
emancipation.
If the national state scenario of modern politics—the scenario
proper to the political activity of citizens and parties—has decomposed because
it has been disavowed by capital as a privileged place for the translation and
hermeneutics of its "will," and because the political activity that
took place in it has thus shown the limitation of the sovereignty or decision-making
capacity that it claimed to have, isn't it extemporaneous that a
reconstruction of the left is thought of in the form of the construction of a
left-wing political party? (Echeverría, ¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011, pág.
255)
The demand
for other forms of organization other than political parties is the obligatory
conclusion. Here the need to invent these alternative forms that fight against
capitalism is postulated, although it is never mentioned what type the new
organizations would be, nor is it clearly indicated what their spaces of action
would be, because the state space of politics has entered into crisis.
Isn't it time to imagine other forms of organization and action
that are capable of collecting and harmonizing—as Marx said communists should
do—as much as possible of the innumerable extra-"political" forms of
presence that the anti-capitalist political has in today's society?
(Echeverría, ¿Ser de izquierda, hoy?, 2011, pág. 255)
The
premises that sustain the reasoning and political positioning of Bolívar
Echeverría come up against the ugly reality: the national states are making a
strong comeback, driven by the nationalisms of the ultra-right and becoming the
place of inter-imperialist disputes; the political parties continue to dominate
politics, converted into apparatuses that mobilize large dissatisfied masses
that find no way out either in the system or outside it. The anti-system
discourses of the ultra-right serve to appropriate the system; democratic
institutions are falling apart, and the rights won with long and painful
struggles disappear in an instant.
In this
panorama, do Echeverría's theses hold up? Has the search for forms of political
organization that are alternatives to political parties worked? Has politics
prevailed over politics? Paradoxically, it must be recognized that the state
political space as a place where politics is made has deteriorated almost to
the point of losing its meaning. In addition, the inadequacy of the struggles
within the state system has been evident for a long time. However, at this
moment of retreat of resistance against capital, workers do not have the
ability to choose the territory of struggle, which is ultimately imposed by
capital.
2.
Natural nation.
Undoubtedly,
the most creative part of Echeverría's political theory is articulated around
what he calls the natural nation, certainly using unexpected terminology. It
starts from a radical questioning of the division between civil society and
political society, which acquires its definitive status in Hegel. Underlying
this conception is the idea that the only possible modernity is capitalist.
He traces
the origin of politics long before its constitution in alienated political
society through the process of capitalist production; at that moment when it
seems to be purely economic, politics is found. From the beginning, capitalism
is a political action that subjects social life to repression and alienation.
The extraction of surplus value and its appropriation by the bourgeoisie are
not only economic phenomena but also radically political.
If we take, as I believe we should, this "general law of
capitalist accumulation" as the text that most adequately sums up the
overall meaning of the critique of political economy, then we can say that, for
Marx, the capitalist mode of social reproduction is based on something we might
call "repression and fundamental alienation of the political." Let me
explain: for Marx, the political is not one characteristic among others of
social life but the specific or constitutive character of it. (Echeverría,
Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011,
pág. 73)
In such a
way that all social life is immediately political, because the latter does not
come to it as an element that comes after or as a later consequence that
provides the means for the enlarged reproduction of capital. The law of
capitalist accumulation signifies the alienation of the political, which,
later, will become politics acting on the stage of the nation-state through its
well-known forms.
If capital
alienates the political from its foundations, what is hidden behind this
alienation? What has been repressed? The politics of Echeverría "consist
in that essential need of each man to live in a polis or in society with
others. " In this sense, societies are simultaneously civil and political
from their origin and every moment of their development. Politics becomes the
essence of social life. This first and fundamental politics is the one that
capital subsumes under its system of exploitation. (Echeverría, Cuestionario
sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 73)
What does
the political consist of as a constitutive aspect of social life? Where does it
emerge from and why is it found in every social process and in any society? The
formation of the political occurs when the social subject not only reproduces
himself through metabolism with nature but also chooses to "self-realize
himself in a social form chosen or projected by him," projecting himself
beyond natural conditionings in such a way that "they are realizations of
ends of the subject himself or fulfillment of purposes adequate to his project
of self-realization." (Echeverría, Cuestionario sobre lo político
(Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 74)
In the process of social production, the natural process of
reproduction is duplicated by a process that accompanies it and that is
precisely what we can call the process of political reproduction. By working
and enjoying, by producing transformations with use value, or by consuming
produced goods, the social subject simultaneously prefigures and effects a
certain form of sociality and defines the identity of his polis as a concrete
society. (Echeverría, Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis
Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 74)
Echeverría
discovers a double process of production: on the one hand, there are the use
values by means of which we produce objects of whatever kind that satisfy
needs; on the other hand, there is the process of political reproduction, which
occurs because at the moment in which we work, and this is always a social
fact, we project the society in which we want to live and build a world of our
own for the community. The process of production is, at the same time, the
production of a type of society.
With these
elements, Echeverría defines the political:
This ability to synthesize or totalize the form of its social life
would be the basic political or fundamental politics of the social subject. And
this, then, would be precisely the capacity that is necessarily being repressed
and alienated by the capitalist mode of social reproduction. (Echeverría,
Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011,
pág. 74)
In other
words, the political ceases to be the superstructure that the economy expels
and through which the interests of a minority become, through repression and
alienation, the false will of all and are transformed into the constitution of
a sphere inherent to social life, which arises at every moment in which a
social subject prefigures a sociality. in which he will self-realize
collectively and individually. In this way, there is no civil society that is
not immediately political because, together with the metabolism with nature,
social subjects set their own ends and imagine and build the society in which
they want to live.
This basic
sociality is truncated in its full realization. The imposition of the
valorization of value as the only social purpose in capitalism alienates the
political and prevents social subjects from designing their own societies free
of exploitation. However, economic and political domination are never complete,
nor do they manage to exhaustively subordinate the political life that
underlies each social subject. Resistance against capital, in the form of
spontaneous and still elementary anti-capitalism, is constantly being made and
remade. The political cannot be abolished by the politics of capital.
It could even be said that the politics of the capital commodity
are constituted in a constant struggle to repress the spontaneous
anti-capitalist resistance of the subject—which is regenerated again and again
from very different foci—since it is from this resistance that the subject can
take advantage of the historical possibilities of becoming revolutionary, that
is, of resuming its own basic politics. (Echeverría, Cuestionario sobre lo
político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 83)
The
revolutionary spirit of the workers exists, embryonically, since their
constitution as a class in the economic sphere. The fact that the worker resists
the imposition of capital and, even if it is in a confused and difficult way,
proposes to exercise this resistance, in addition to setting goals for his own
existence, means the formation of the first level of politics, which underlies
all the others as its truth and foundation. Revolution is included from the
very moment that the commodity is formed and money is placed as the purpose of
humanity.
Echeverria
continues to dig, like the mole of historical materialism, until he finds the
underlying explanations for this capacity for resistance to capital, to this
natural anti-capitalism given in the social relations of production:
Where does
the possibility of resisting the alienation of its politics come from in the
social subject? And the polemical nature of the answer is also inescapable: it
comes from the historical-cultural concretization of the social subject, from
what we have to call its "natural nationality." (Echeverría,
Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011,
págs. 83-84)
The
natural nation, which is opposed to the modern nation-state, is the sphere in
which sociality is constituted when it succeeds in emancipating itself from the
domination of capital; that is, the politics of political society, as part of the
bourgeois state, returns to its base, the political. The anti-capitalist spirit
of resistance against capitalist exploitation, at the very core of the
production process, in order to exist effectively has to be realized
historically. Just as capital ends up endowing itself with a mode of production
and a corresponding social formation, in the same way, the political, freed
from oppression, endows the worker with a natural nationality:
The resistance of the social subject to the mechanism that
alienates its politics would not effectively exist if there were not this
anti-capitalist tendency of the forces and capacities of production and
consumption; it is thanks to this that the resistance of the subject, precisely
by acquiring concrete historical corporeality, converts the social subject into
a subject endowed with "natural nationality." (Echeverría,
Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011,
págs. 84-85)
The
natural nation is the social subject par excellence, the one that resists the
colonization of the political by capitalism; moreover, it is at the basis of
all historically given socialities. At other times, Echeverría resorts to the
term "natural society," which, in my opinion, expresses in a better way
the social being that is located outside capitalism and the reification of the
political; this notion is found in Thesis 5 of Modernity and Capitalism. In the
case of capitalist societies, the state is the alienated natural nation, that
is, trapped in the logic of the valorization of capital. (Echeverría, Las
ilusiones de la modernidad, 2001, pág. 167)
The
"natural nation" is the substance which, inverted, takes the form of
a nation of the State. That is why everything that is fluidity, instability,
conflict, and self-denial, in the real nation is transfigured into rigidity and
permanence. (Echeverría, Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis
Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 87)
The
mechanisms of repression of the natural nation are never complete; There are
always cracks, fractures, and splits through which resistance flows and
non-alienated sociality is expressed, provisionally and confusedly, as a place
of expression of the use value and of the projects of realization of social
subjects and individuals.
Although
Echeverría does not mention it, the interpretation that can be given to the
nation or natural sociality is related to the overcoming of the distinction
between nature and culture. Natural sociality would be that which emerges from
metabolism with nature and is sustained by harmony with nature and by the
exercise of freedom by social subjects and individuals. Rather than there being
an opposition between these two terms, there is a continuity. In this sense,
these reflections are close to the redefinition of the relationship between
nature and culture, supported by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe
Descola. (Viveiros de Castro, 2009) (Descola, 2012)
Left-wing
politics consists of the ability to recognize, strengthen, and organize the
spontaneous anti-capitalist movement that has not been able to be integrated
into the market. It is a question of discovering the political that emerges
from the depths of capital before it is alienated by the political machinery of
the nation-state. In every social process, even in those moments of profound
defeat, there are spontaneous resistances that are not controlled by power and
that must serve as the basis for the construction of that natural nation as an
alternative non-capitalist modernity.
… precisely in those regions or in those moments of spontaneous
anti-capitalist social behavior that are not automatically converted into
pro-capitalist behaviors by the political and ideological superstructure; that
have ceased to be, that have not yet been, or that simply cannot be integrated
into the cosmic politics of the commodity-capital. (Echeverría, Cuestionario
sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 85)
In his
book Use Value and Utopia, Echeverría will provide sustenance to this sociality
called "natural nation," elaborating a political economy of use value
as an alternative to the capitalist mode of production; hence the name
"natural," insofar as there is no rupture between use value and
value, and there is no split between nature and labor. For this reason, the
concept of natural means, in Echeverría, is the model of production and society
that has not been alienated by capitalism and that rises above free social
subjects by deploying a project of collective and individual self-realization.
(Echeverría, Valor de uso y utopía, 1998)
Following
the development of his thought, which will reach its full expression in the
Baroque Ethos, Echeverría links the constitution of the natural nation with the
cultural revolution as the place where resistance against capital and the
struggle against alienation are carried out. It is not a question of a
culturalist turn, so typical of some currents in Latin America, especially of
decolonial orientations, but of the full articulation between the political and
the cultural.
But I believe that the approach to the problem of the reification
of the political as an ideological phenomenon should lead us to address the
question that encompasses it and gives it meaning (and which at this moment we
can only mention): the question of the cultural revolution. (Echeverría,
Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011,
pág. 89)
The battle
against the hijacking of the political by capitalism takes place, for
Echeverría, primarily in the sphere of the cultural, without this implying that
the political is left aside. Cultural confrontation is the manifestation of the
political, or, if you prefer, the political struggle by other means, and not
the abolition of the political as seen in cultural turns. There is no
replacement function because the disalienation of the political and the
cultural revolution mean the same thing.
The
Cultural Revolution, as an expression of the anti-capitalist resistance,
occupies the semiotic space with the dispute over the meanings of cultural
practices. Perhaps approaching the popular nation, this thesis postulates the
construction of a (Oliva Mendoza, 2013) historical-concrete cultural code, that
is, a system of meanings and cultural expressions that position themselves with
respect to the processes of alienation and give answers that are always
ambiguous. The paradigmatic example to which he points on many occasions is
that of the Virgin of Guadalupe and her function, at the same time, as
mechanisms of alienation and resistance.
The "natural nation," as an anti-capitalist resistance
of the whole social subject—with its pre- and post-capitalist origins—generates
certain internally contradictory forms of realization of the
historical-concrete cultural code through which it works and enjoys in the
routine and in the celebration of its daily time. (Echeverría, Cuestionario
sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y José Ron), 2011, pág. 89)
The
cultural life of the nation is a territory of battle for the senses of the
world, which occurs constantly and in all social spaces. There, the cultural
code of the natural nation resists the onslaught of capitalism and the
commodity and tries to survive in the face of the imposition of hegemonic
cultural codes that try to re-functionalize it, that is, to put it at the
service of the valorization of value:
Its practice and reflection, which are always communication,
encryption, and decipherment of meanings, carry with them in all cases not only
the fulfillment of a specific cultural code but also a vitality, a conflictive
transformation of it. It is this cultural, practical, and discursive life of
the "natural nation" that is being refunctionalized by statist
politics and its construction of the nation of the commodity capital. And it is
in the analysis of this refunctionalization of the natural national culture and
of the possibilities of a cultural revolution against such refunctionalization
that we should seek the answer to the ideological problem you mention.
(Echeverría, Cuestionario sobre lo político (Conversación con Luis Corral y
José Ron), 2011, pág. 89)
A
semiotics of revolution based on the understanding of the production process as
a phenomenon that is both economic and semiotic. When commodities are produced
and circulated through money as a general equivalent, meanings are also being
produced that are appropriated and transmitted in various ways by the classes
involved. The economic battlefield is populated by confrontations of meaning,
ciphers, and decipherments. The social revolution is always simultaneously a
cultural revolution.
On the
basis of this ontological scheme, EcheI would see It critically draws on
concepts from semiotic theory and structural linguistics to argue for the
identity between the production/consumption of practical objects and the
production/consumption of meanings (conceived as a duality rather than a
dualism). For him, every practical object is at the same time a significant
object, precisely because of its 'transnaturalization'—its situation within a
process of reproduction politically and culturally, rather than merely
'animal'—a situation devoid of any guaranteed correspondence between the moment
of the object's production and that of its consumption. (Sáenz de Sicilia &
Brito Rojas, 2014, pág. 21)
This
identity of economy and language should not be understood as a reduction of
production to the production of meanings. The production and consumption of
commodities is maintained, but what is not always visible is that, being a set
of social relations, it must necessarily be mediated by language; hence, the
need for a revolutionary semiotics. In this respect it differs clearly from
elaborations such as Baudrillard's (Baudrillard, 1969).
3.
The communist revolution as a horizon of being on the left.
In
the article On the left, Echeverría explicitly states what he means by being on
the left. It begins with a critique of Habermas, who proposed the
abandonment of the revolutionary perspective in favor of a reformist strategy.
But this position is unacceptable, because it means the abandonment of the core
of historical materialism and anti-capitalist positions. (Echeverría, A la
izquierda, 2011)
Echeverría
turns Habermas' approach on its head and draws the opposite conclusion:
"Does clearing one's head of absolutist revolutionary illusions have to
mean for the left an abandonment of its revolutionary orientation? Or can it
be, on the contrary, an opportunity to clarify and enrich their concept of
revolution?" Therefore, it is a question of rethinking the revolution and
of situating it in the new conditions of struggle after the failure of the
socialist revolutions. (Echeverría, A la izquierda, 2011, pág. 100)
The idea
of revolution persists, since it is the instrument that best expresses the
bankruptcy of one social system and its replacement by another, the expiration
of the present and the demand for a different future: "As a concept proper
to this discourse, the idea of revolution belongs to a set of descriptive
categories of effective historical dynamics; it refers, in particular, to a
modality of the transition process that leads from a given state of affairs to
another that succeeds it." (Echeverría, A la izquierda, 2011, pág. 102)
At this
historical moment, humanity is faced with the dilemma of reaction or
revolution, of the triumph of conservative and reactionary forces or the
possibility of an alternative, revolutionary future outside of capitalism,
despite the fact that at this moment it is presented to us as utopian.
Echeverría's words are prophetic, although he could not have imagined the
present historical situation, characterized by the rise of fascism and the
ultra-right, which he describes very clearly:
In a
second sense, completely opposite to the first, the success of the reaction of
form in the face of the nonconformity of substance, that is, the triumph of the
prevailing "state of things" over "things" themselves, is
presented as an epoch of exaggerated reaffirmation of the established social
order and of systematic destruction of the social body, a time that, when it
does not slowly and individually "bleed" its historical energies,
sacrifices them abruptly and massively. (Echeverría, A la izquierda, 2011, pág.
104)
This
systematic destruction of the social body attacks democracy, including the
institutions and mechanisms that structure it, imposing as a norm a permanent
state of exception. Basic rights are dismantled, and international and national
violence reigns without limit. It is the moment of the abrupt and massive
sacrifice of the new enemy constructed, which is the migrant, the other and the
different.
What was
seen as a possibility has now become a reality; the reactionary forces have
taken power, the left either retreats or disappears, the spaces of opposition
are closed, and those who want to resist are persecuted or killed.
This path
of transition – in which the future is subdued and devoured by the past – is
the retrograde or reactionary path that history can follow in its processes of
transition. Retrograde or reactionary is, therefore, the ethical-political
attitude that allows itself to be intimidated by this arrogant response of the
establishment and that identifies with it. (Echeverría, A la izquierda, 2011,
pág. 104)
However,
Echeverría does not abandon himself to pessimism or despair. It remains firmly
rooted in the verification of resistance and in the real possibility of
subversion and substitution. Against defeatism or reformism, he reaffirms the
ethical-political condition of revolutionary commitment. In addition, there is
no separation of the political from the ethical or a denial of the political to
remain exclusively in an ethical position, but the two aspects merge into a
single movement: the ethical-political, thus united with a script to highlight
their inseparability.
… alternative forms are created that begin to compete openly with
the established one; new modes of economic behavior and social coexistence are
prefigured, designed, and put into practice. This way out, which passes through
a subversion (Umwälzung) destined to replace (Ersetzung) and not only to renew
the prevailing "state of affairs," is the solution to the historical
demand for transition that constitutes the foundation of the revolutionary
ethical-political position." (Echeverría, A la izquierda, 2011, pág. 105)
Echeverría
adopts a position, in my opinion fully valid, on the relationship between
reform and revolution. While reforms are indispensable in the transition to
socialism and must be considered in any revolutionary strategy, they are
meaningless and ultimately ineffective unless they are linked to the
revolution, despite the utopian character of the revolution because of the profoundly
reactionary time that humanity is going through.
"The reformist goals themselves occupy with their undoubted
relevance the entire foreground of the political concerns of the active and
realistic left. But left-wing discourse would take a self-destructive vow of
poverty if it decided to remain exclusively within the confines of that
foreground. It cannot ignore the fact that, in the background, of less clarity,
there are also political goals that are only perceptible in the perspective of
a revolutionary modality of the historical transition in which society is
currently engaged. Goals that are urgent, that is, that have a real and not
illusory need, but that are utopian because they are inopportune in terms of
the possibility of their immediate realization." (Echeverría, A la
izquierda, 2011, pág. 107)
Juanes
analyzes this point with all the relevance it has in Echeverría: "Bolívar
distinguishes, of course, between reforms promoted by the left that could
contribute to attenuating the exploitation and helplessness of the majority and
the 'encouraged reforms' from power, aimed at reinforcing, perpetuating, and
optimizing the iron law of capital accumulation" (Juanes, 2015, págs. 3-4)
And he
insists on the disastrous consequences caused by remaining only in the reforms,
with the false hope that the capitalist system can be fixed in some way through
wresting small conditions that make the exploitation of the workers less
burdensome; for this reason, the reform can only be understood as a part not
separate from the revolutionary project: "Any partial confrontation with
the capitalist mode of production must be understood as a moment aimed at the
achievement of strict socialism." (Juanes, 2015, págs. 3-4)
All these
considerations lead to the argument that being on the left has to do with the
transition from politics to politics; that is, the broadening of the meaning of
politics, which makes it possible to overcome the entrapment within the State
and the expanded reproduction of capital and its society. Politics, even when
it is practiced in a radical way, is not capable of going beyond the stage in
which it acts, which is the national state.
To
confront a system established in the domain of nature and workers, barbarism,
and uniformity of souls and bodies, Bolívar draws an extremely subtle border
between the political and the political. By politics, it identifies, in
essence, the set of party practices limited to reforming the system, without
ever putting in check the nucleus that is the backbone of capital. (Juanes,
2015, págs. 3-4)
On the
other hand, the political becomes the mode of existence of the left-wing,
revolutionary social subject, who projects himself into the future from the
perspective of collective and individual self-realization, illuminated by
freedom.
The
problem of the political thus lies in the following: How to found a
revolutionary historical legitimacy that allows insurgent subjectivity to be
the protagonist of history? What can be done to achieve a historical-political
organization in which free individuals define the meaning they want to give to
their lives according to freely chosen ends? Where to start? (Juanes, 2015,
pág. 5)
This tour
of the politics and the meaning of being on the left in Bolívar Echeverría
indicates that there are no easy or simple answers to this question. The
profoundly reactionary character of the epoch in which humanity is immersed
makes it even more difficult to find a path that is not only correct but also
viable and effective for the anti-capitalist transformation of society.
While disagreeing
with the denial of politics as a valid field of action to resist capital and
the power that accompanies it, the expansion of a reductive vision and practice
that remains in the space of the nation state is an indispensable component of
any strategy of communist revolution.
It would
be worth saying that it is a matter of appropriately combining intervention in
the field of politics, always located in the world of politics; that is, the
understanding that struggles on the state stage only make sense if they are
oriented towards the overcoming and replacement of capitalist society. And, in
this context, to know that the communist revolution is at the same time a
cultural revolution and a battle for collective and individual meanings.
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