Constructing Worlds Otherwise

Raúl Zibechi has long been one of the leading leftist journalists in Latin America. He has gained unique and powerful perspectives through his accompaniment of “pueblos in movement,” ranging from the Zapatistas to the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). He is also a major theorist of autonomismo, an antistatist current that over the past three decades has gained importance throughout the region.His new book offers a sustained critique of the global and especially the Latin American Left. His fundamental criticism is that the Left's strategy to obtain power via either armed struggle or electoral politics reproduces the “coloniality of power,” the gender and ethnic hierarchies that the capitalist state has relied on for centuries. Zibechi leans on the Greek-French scholar Cornelius Castoriadis's career-long leftist critique of the theory and practice of Marxism and Leninism. What's unique is Zibechi's methodological approach and some of his illustrative case studies. He dispenses with the concept of “social movement” as a European/US construct inadequate to describe the global South's pueblos in movement. He also critiques Marx's notion of class struggle. According to Zibechi, the pueblos in movement wish not to dissolve their prior “conditions of existence,” as Marx claimed of the proletariat, but rather to transform them. Zibechi takes from Fernand Braudel the notion of civilization/culture as the only force capable of “limiting the expansionist voracity of capitalism” (p. 51) and the distinction between material life as the place of fair exchanges and capitalism as the place of unequal exchanges whose expansion was decisively assured by the state. Zibechi uses this framework to emphasize how pueblos in movement inhabit the spaces of material life and the market. The Uruguayan theorist also engages the work of Abdullah Öcalan, the longtime imprisoned leader of the Kurdish resistance, and the contributions of Kurdish feminists.Zibechi presents models of “anti-state” actors in rural and semiurban areas. He briefly examines the Rondas Campesinas in Peru, the community police of Guerrero, Mexico, the Acapatzingo housing community in Mexico City, and communal defense in Cherán, Michoacán. In each, local residents have organized for self-defense against organized crime, the state, and extractive industries. The groups also exemplify highly democratic governing structures and communal and collective work, as do the Zapatistas. Zibechi argues that these are not counterpowers but “nonstate powers,” in which all delegates rotate and are revocable. Moreover, “Zapatista autonomy is largely defined by the modes of organization and resistance in their community culture, in which collective production is central” (p. 126). Indeed, Zibechi argues that through community control over large extensions of land and democratic governance, the area controlled by the Zapatistas is largely self-sufficient, each community able to develop food security as well as a robust health and education network.Zibechi considers the Zapatistas but one of numerous models of egalitarian communities that offer in his view the only viable means for a transformation away from capitalism; others include vast communal endeavors in northwestern Venezuela, the cabildos and the Indigenous guards of the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC), and the expropriated lands of the MST. Members of all the communities sketched by Zibechi have created new economies that involve somewhat voluntary forms of collectivization of resources and labor, with ample land reserved for familial cultivation. In addition, the communities all engage in an internal barter system. They also sell surpluses on the open market to access goods they cannot produce.Zibechi compellingly argues that these vast communities involving millions of people are actively creating new egalitarian (including gender) societies, alternative economies, and new epistemologies. And yet, there are some limitations to his vision. Although Zibechi claims that urban populations also are creating such communities, and he offers the example of Mexico City and the recovered factories of Argentina, he does not develop those experiences. More significantly, because he rejects Marxist models he disregards the potential contribution in the struggle for social and political change of some 60 million industrial workers and their unions in the region, except to the extent that they might be organized in recuperated communities. Zibechi forcefully asserts the inapplicability of Western “Enlightenment” models to Latin American Indigenous struggles and societies, although he allows for the impact of European revolutions. His analysis is bold, but he generally refuses to search for ways in which these largely rural and often remote pueblos in movement could ally with more traditional organizations such as unions. Nor does he grant any legitimacy to Left governments or concede that the movements he champions might gain space or even protection from some of them. For the CRIC, is there no difference between an Iván Duque and a Gustavo Petro government?The essays collected here deal with similar themes without a great deal of overlap. That said, a unified discussion of Zapatista governance and economy would have been salutary. Moreover, the history of the pueblos in movement is quite underdeveloped. The translation is adequate, but the book's language and structure do not make for an accessible read for undergraduates. It is a provocative book by an outstanding journalist and theorist and would be highly useful in Latin American studies graduate classes

Aesthetics · Art · Latin Americans · Movement (music) · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · History · Latin American Cultural Politics · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

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