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NEWS & LETTERS,
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003
Dialectics of Latin American liberation
by Roger Hollander THE CONCEPT OF OTHER IN LATIN AMERICAN LIBERATION:
FUSING EMANCIPATORY THOUGHT AND SOCIAL REVOLT, by Eugene Gogol (Lexington Books,
2002) Anyone who has lived and/or followed the Latin American
experience/reality in the post-World War II era will have experienced a
Sisyphian frustration with respect to the rise and fall of liberation movements
and the hope for new human relations to which they aspire. In the eight years I
have lived in Ecuador I have witnessed two successful "leftist" coup
d’etats that have resulted in absolutely no fundamental social, political, or
economic change whatsoever--to the contrary, the economic/political crisis
deepens. In Ecuador, the 1980s saw intense grassroots organization
within the indigenous community that culminated in the formation of a national
indigenous organization, CONAIE, whose power was expressed in the 1990s through
massive protests against oil exploitation in the Amazon rainforest,
privatization of social security, and reactionary agricultural laws. The indigenous revolt of 2000, its contradictions and the
reasons for its ultimate failure is taken up in THE CONCEPT OF OTHER IN LATIN
AMERICAN LIBERATION. Gogol points out the contradictions within the leadership
of the indigenous movement between those who relied on the creativity of the
masses and those who allied themselves with government power. This has come to a
tragic fruition with the Gutierrez government, causing disunity within the
indigenous movement that may take decades to repair. These events in Ecuador are
in a sense a paradigm of the failures encountered in post-World War II Latin
America. In the first section of the book, Gogol argues that the
Hegelian-Marxian dialectic is a SINE QUA NON of truly liberatory revolutionary
activity that intersects most dramatically with Latin American historical
reality. To those who dismiss Hegel, Gogol shows that they do so at the peril of
sacrificing the methodology that can keep revolutionary thought and
revolutionary activity dynamic and in sync with social reality. He takes us upon a philosophical journey touching upon the
concept of Other and consideration of the dialectic in the writings of Latin
American thinkers including Octavio Paz, Leopoldo Zea, Augusto Salazar Bondy,
Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Arturo Andrés Roig. He outlines the unique,
important and positive contributions made by each, but concludes that in each
one encounters an inability or unwillingness to delve deeply into Hegel's
"voyage of discovery." In the second section --"Imprisonment of the Other:
the Logic of Capital on Latin American Soil"--we find a review of major
Latin American thinkers of the 20th century--like José Carlos Mariátegui,
Enrique Semo and Roger Bartra. Again, we encounter a richness in thought and
analysis of capital's stranglehold on the masses, showing us that the work of
Marx as well as Hegel has taken root in Latin American soil. But we do not yet
see the Other unbound. What we find again is the failure to recognize the second
negation, the positive in the negative, the pathway to genuine liberation. In discussing liberation theology's inability to sustain
its momentum in the face of the changing realities and setbacks of movements in
Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, Gogol asks: "If one develops a
concept of social change, without such a theoretical labor flowing from a
fullness of philosophy of revolution, then what happens to one's theory when the
social movement, the historic moment, has changed?" (p. 115). Referring to Marx's economics, not as economic determinism,
but rather as a "unity of humanism and philosophy;" not a mere
sociology but as a philosophy of liberation. Gogol demonstrates how one
expression of revolutionary subjectivity after another has fallen prey to the
dead end of state-capitalism or reformist accommodation with different forms of
capitalism. The third section of the work is a journey through selected
contemporary liberation movements in Latin America. From the Rio Grande to
Tierra del Fuego, we see different forms of revolutionary subjectivity in
action: urban, rural, indigenous, women, workers, students, and others. In each
of these, be it the tin miners in Bolivian campesinos in Guatemala, labor
organizers in Bolivia, labor organizers in Mexico's maquiladoras, the Madres de
la Plaza of Argentina, or the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, Gogol shows
us how self-liberation re-creates itself in its own social environment, creating
new pathways towards liberation. In the Zapatistas of Chiapas, he finds the freshest and
most innovative expression of revolutionary subjectivity. In their rejection of
focoism, and in aiming not to take state power for themselves but rather to
unify the various expressions of Other in Mexico, the Zapatistas broke new
ground. Instead of adopting the dead-end, vanguardist "dictatorship of the
proletariat" strategies and philosophies which the original urban radicals
had brought to Chiapas, what emerged was a re-creation of the principles of
collectivity in decision making, that were already inherent and deeply seated in
the ways of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. As one concerned with understanding and changing Latin
America, I see this work as of supreme importance. Although there are a few
omissions (the most glaring being a failure to discuss the Colombian situation),
the work is comprehensive and probing. The book concludes with a discussion of philosophy and
organization, noting, "It is the theoretician-philosopher(s) who catches
the mass self-activity from below, and labors to give it meaning by rooting it
within the Marxist-Hegelian philosophic expression...Marx was not afraid to
speak of 'our party' even in the times when it was only he and Engels" (p.
343). As one who lives and observes on a daily basis both the ravages of globalized capitalism and the frustration of liberation movements in Ecuador, I can attest to the urgent need for new beginnings in Latin America. And in the light of the Bush doctrine of permanent war and his plans to augment existing U.S. military force in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Honduras, and with new bases in the Galapagos, Brazil, El Salvador and Argentina, the Marxist-Humanist primary task takes on renewed urgency: "To the barbarism of war we pose the new society." |
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