By Katherine B. Hankins and Emily M. Powers

By Lucy Taylor

Read full article at Bulletin of Latin American Research

(…) Despite such critiques, many people in many ways are becoming more like citizens. They are more certain of their value as individuals in relation to others who are richer and more powerful, and they are better aware of their rights (because the struggle for democracy and the practice of democratisation has made them so) (Taylor, 2003). They are more likely to think in terms of rights, both because international organisations are promoting a discourse of rights, and because neo-liberalism sees the recourse to rights as being the chief protection mechanism for sovereign consumers. The biggest growth area in social organisation is consumer groups (closely followed by neighbourhood improvement schemes) and NGOs flourish in the privatised world of social policy (Jelin and Herschberg, 1996). Yet this trend towards a strengthening of citizenship has not resulted in the Latin American democracies, states and citizens becoming deeper, more coherent or more equal. Indeed, the key trend of the last 10 years has been the resurgence of populism and the return of the familiar political messiah. This seems to present a conundrum – how can people feel more like citizens but act more like clients?

Having considered the nature of the relationship between political leader and people, three key reasons why citizenship is failing strike me. Firstly, neo-liberalism has changed both abstract thinking and government policies regarding poverty. The concept of ‘privatisation’ is central to neo-liberal citizenship, whereby power (and indeed freedom) is equated with personal, individualised agency articulated through private, social and voluntary interactions (with friends, neighbours, charities for example) or through legal or economic transactions (exercising one’s civil rights or buying and selling in the market). Privatisation is a policy which seeks to shift tasks and power from the realm of the state into the ‘private’ realm of individual and market. Within this schema, both populist social justice and citizenship welfare rights are dismissed by the neo-liberal philosophy because their deliberate redistribution of wealth punishes those who (by dint of their talents) have accumulated wealth, as well as interfering with market forces. Social justice is misguided because it is determined by political considerations, not the market, and welfare rights are judged to be not rights at all because they require purposeful intervention, unlike negative rights (civil and political) which merely establish mechanisms. Of course, pure neo-liberalism has not been enacted in Latin America, but the consequences of freeing market forces and cutting public services have been impoverishment, unemployment, worse social indicators (malnutrition, infant deaths, disease) and insecurity. In tune with privatisation, NGOs – by definition private entities – have stepped into the social service breech but their assistance is based on specific projects which cover a certain time and place (Gideon, 1998). They do not contemplate universal coverage nor is their continuation guaranteed and so in no sense do they sustain social rights, despite their genuine commitment to improving people’s lives. Citizenship has changed dramatically, then, because it has lost welfare rights, a key component which sought to redress inequalities in the exercise of civil and political rights. With impoverishment and without welfare rights, people’s capacity to exercise their remaining rights has therefore been severely curbed.

Secondly, while it is undoubtedly preferable to operate under conditions of liberal democracy, the liberal historicist understanding of inequality, with its blindness to structures of discrimination and disdain, has been heightened by its more extreme characterisation as neo-liberalism. Public discourse sustains the myth of equal rights through recourse to privatisation which places responsiblity for social and class inequalities in the hands of the individual, in the private, social sphere and outside the realm of politics. Yet the ‘level playing field’ which exists on paper is distorted by the very uneven terrain of familiar assumptions about civilisation and degeneracy, about progress and backwardness, about rationality and perception, and about who should follow whom, who should adopt whose lifestyles, who is right and who must learn. The fact that this heightened inequality is part of lived experience also means that the sham of equal citizenship is similarly blatant and it makes a constant mockery of democratic ideals.

Thirdly, the primary vehicles of democratic political participation – parties – persist in maintaining intellectual hierarchies of disdain, whether they reflect biological or historicist explanations of inequality (Taylor, 2003). They continue to act as vanguards even though people have largely ceased to follow them and to take themselves, rather than citizens, very seriously. Parties generally discourage the kind of active participation which they achieved in the past by simultaneously misinterpreting, over-ruling and underestimating their potential supporters. There are some notable exceptions, including the Partido dos Trabalhadores in Brazil and the Partido por la Democracia in Chile, both of which have strong links to civil society and were formed during, not before, the transitions to democracy. Yet more generally, parties are no longer the sole means of political communication and action, and those people in society who wish to change the world or think new thoughts now join social organisations instead which often lead public debate and leave the parties to play catch-up behind. This leaves parties both outmoded and without the kind of internal dissent which challenges policy and holds dominant factions to account, which in turn undermines pluralism within these central
agencies of democratic life. The paradox is that despite their decreasing relevance to people’s lives and their lack of representativity, they continue to hold power in government and actually continue to wield immense power, despite globalisation. This presents a crisis of political citizenship because the official channels are both unresponsive and mistrusted, whilst the channels of civil society are ultimately very limited in their capacity to change macro-political projects such as structural adjustment or social policy.

One of the other reasons why conventional citizenship politics is in crisis is because such parties do not guarantee anything in return for the people’s vote – client-ship on the other hand, offers a great deal more and this perhaps explains why neo-populism has proved to be popular (for a time and in certain places). In particular, it proffers two comforts (familiarity and the hope of tangible improvement in one’s personal life) and one bonus (the possible pleasure of exercising a little power). Client-ship is one of the familiar pathways of Latin American political culture. It locks into a sense of belonging and identity which reaches deep into the struggles of daily life; it is about personalities and families, favours and favourites, admiration, emotion and a business deal (Auyero, 2001). As such, it treats people seriously and touches people’s emotional and material lives more closely and effectively than a more distanced, citizenship-style politics does. Secondly, support for a patronage-style party via its local representative increases the chance that some small improvement will occur in people’s lives – this, after all, is the nature of the political relationship which couples charisma with the votes-for-goods deal. Indeed, the poverty of structural adjustment and collapse of state services makes this mechanism even more vital as people seek protection in the ‘private’ world of NGOs, churches and political patronage (Gideon, 1998; Auyero, 2001). A party that does not operate patronage, in contrast, can more easily ignore its individual constituents because it gives no personal guarantees to citizens who have serious needs. Finally, just like citizenship, client-ship also appeals to people’s desire for agency because it encourages and even demands participation in the circus of mobilisations and fiestas that accompany elections. People recognise the limitations of the performance but they enjoy exercising their limited power and look forward to the possible rewards which this political ‘work’ might yield (Lazar, 2003). Political work in citizen-style politics is equally exciting, of course, but given that people are short on time and very short on money, only the most dedicated militantes will turn out to wave a flag in the plaza ‘for nothing’.

We should not rejoice in the flourishing of patronage politics and client-ship, though. Neo-populism is, of course, characterised by autocracy, corruption and violence. It cares little for the plight of the poor, merely throwing them scraps of hope – children’s milk, subsidised seeds, a clinic here, some school chairs there. It tramples over rights, ignores representation and makes arbitrary decisions, and it allows favoured cronies to become very rich by privatising and syphoning off what little the impoverished state has (O’Donnell, 1994). Neo-populism and its attendant client-ship is not a solution to problems of representation, participation and accountability, but for many people it appears to be a better short term strategy than voting for a ‘conventional’ politician who seems neither to understand nor to respect them but who performs a disingenuous pantomime six months before the election.

Unless and until citizenship can provide meaningful participation it will continue to be over-shadowed by client-ship, because the fact that inequality is built-into the patron/client relationship matters little in a social world where the equality of citizenship is a laughable myth. (…)

By Evelina Dagnino, UNICAMP – Brazil

See original post at Culture Web

Being a Brazilian and a Latin American political scientist, what I would like to explore in my presentation are the efforts in conceptualizing culture which have emphasized the relationships between culture and politics. Since it would be impossible to survey all different traditions and ways of conceiving culture, I think this an interesting venue because it entails not only an interdisciplinary approach but it also implied – and still does – two different struggles. First, to convince my fellow political scientists that culture matters; second, to seduce those anthropologists that still do not acknowledge the importance and pervasiveness of power relations as not only present in but as constitutive of culture.

Obviously, the emphasis on the intertwining of culture and politics as an analytical tool/procedure is not, by all means, a Latin American or Brazilian feature. The recognition of culture as pervaded by power relations affecting – for starters – the production and attribution of meanings, has already a tradition of its own, from Raymond Williams to Homi Bhabha and a significant number of others. In this sense, it is part of the “international intellectual and political repertoire” that has been always there, long before globalization became the thing. It is worth to remember though that this is a tradition cultivated and developed mostly within a specific intellectual field – “cultural studies” – and not necessarily generally incorporated by other disciplines. Such an emphasis has been expressed often in the concept of “cultural politics”. The concept has found difficulties in traveling to Latin America, in spite of efforts of cultural studies’ analysts (Daniel Mato, Ana Maria Ochoa, etc), due in part to a difficult translation: políticas culturales (in Spanish or Portuguese) traditionally have meant State policies with respect to “cultural” issues or areas. In addition, in spite of the fact that I have used and even defended the concept in my own work (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar, 1998), I have come to consider it limiting and restrictive as far as a deeper understanding of the relations between culture and politics goes. These limits can be clearly seen when we consider the other “side” of this relational conception of culture and ask: but isn’t politics always cultural? In this perspective, the conception of politics, as characterized in a broad sense by the presence of power relations, would entail culture as a necessary, constitutive element. Symbolic production is not only a crucial element in politics, particularly when we think about who has and who has not the power to attribute meanings, but it is often the main instrument (or weapon) in political action.

Cultural politics has also been formulated as offering a distinctive alternative meaning to the usual niche of culture in Political Science, which is the notion of political culture. But it seems to me that this notion entails, by its turn, a restrictive understanding of both terms: values, beliefs and representations referred to political institutions. In it, politics is usually reduced to the institutional realm (Government, voting and elections, political parties, etc) which ignores a much larger domain where power is exercised and constructed and where cultural elements become clear targets of political action and struggles. But the political dimension of culture is also reduced to a (usually pre) determined set of elements, a part of culture that is acknowledge to be “political”. If the idea of cultural politics was intended to confront this understanding and deploy a different view, perhaps it did not go far enough and should be radicalized into a perception of culture and politics as mutually constitutive and entangled by an indissoluble relationship. As a simultaneous production of meanings and power relations, culture finds its mirror in politics, in which the production and confrontation of power relations always implies cultural meanings.

The main challenge faced by this conceptual emphasis is, in asserting relational and non reductive ways of conceiving culture and politics, the indispensable need for clarifying specificities and different modes of operation of this basic relationship. That is to say, to recognize that both power relations and cultural signifying practices and their relationships do operate differently in different spaces and with respect to different subjects involved.

However, if this conceptual emphasis has been developed as part of an “international repertoire”, its emergence in Brazil and Latin America can still be seen as related to particular national histories and contexts. In fact, this is, I gather, a premise of our discussion here today. In this sense, my presentation will focus on the concrete circumstances underlying the emergence of that conceptual emphasis in Brazil and in other countries of Latin America.

I think it is fair to say that a substantial part of those theoretical efforts have been connected to at least a conjunction of three processes: First, the emergence of the then called new social movements, especially in the contexts of the resistance against military dictatorships and other kinds of authoritarian regimes throughout the continent. Second, in several countries and surely in Brazil, this coincided with the critical renovation of Marxist theory that has been very influential in Political Science and in other disciplines. Third, and linked to those two factors, the question of democratic building and deepening became a crucial theoretical and political concern. I should point out what seems to be perhaps a Latin American feature of all social sciences, i. e. their intimate relationship and contiguity with actual political processes.

The emergence of social movements during the late 1970s and 1980s in Brazil has been an important element in the struggle against the dictatorship installed in 1964. Citizenship and what it most signifies, the idea of equal rights, emerged as a way to operationalize, so to speak, the often abstract notion of democracy, bringing it down to the concrete claims of ordinary people. Increasingly adopted since the mid 1980’s and 1990’s by popular movements, excluded sectors, non-governmental organizations, trade unions and left parties as a central element in their political strategies, the notion of citizenship spread first as a common reference among a variety of social movements such as those of women, blacks and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, retired and senior citizens, consumers, environmentalists, urban and rural workers and those organized around urban issues in the large cities, such as housing, health, education, unemployment, violence, etc. (Foweraker 1995; Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar, 1998). These movements, organized around different demands, found in the reference to citizenship not only a useful tool in their specific struggles but also, in some cases, a powerful articulating link among them. The general claim for equal rights, embedded in the predominant conception of citizenship, was then extended and specified according to the different claims at stake. As part of this process of redefining citizenship, a strong emphasis was put on its cultural dimension, incorporating contemporary concerns with subjectivities, identities and the right to difference

.

Cultural dimensions of citizenship have been increasingly present in different parts of the world. The concern of Brazilian social movements with the need to affirm a “right to have rights” is clearly related to extreme levels of poverty and exclusion, but also to the pervasive social authoritarianism that presides over the unequal and hierarchical organization of social relations as a whole. Class, race, and gender differences constitute the main bases for the social classification that has historically pervaded our cultures, establishing different categories of people hierarchically arranged in their respective “places” in society. Thus, for excluded sectors, the perception of the political relevance of cultural meanings embedded in social practices is part of their daily lives. As part of the authoritarian, hierarchical social ordering of Latin American societies, to be poor means not only economic, material deprivation, but also the submission to cultural rules that convey a complete lack of recognition of poor people as subjects or bearers of rights. In what Telles called the incivility embedded in that tradition,

poverty is a sign of inferiority, a way of being in which individuals become unable to exercise their rights. This cultural deprivation imposed by the absolute absence of rights—which ultimately expresses itself as a suppression of human dignity—then becomes constitutive of material deprivation and political exclusion.

The perception of this cultural social authoritarianism as a dimension of exclusion, in addition to economic inequality and political subordination, became a significant element in the struggle to redefine citizenship.

First, it made clear that the struggle for rights, for the right to have rights, had to be a political struggle against a pervasive culture of social authoritarianism, thus setting the grounds for the urban popular movements to establish a connection between culture and politics that became embedded in their collective action. The redefinition of citizenship implied a project for a new sociability: a more egalitarian format for social relations at all levels, new rules for living together in society (negotiation of conflicts, new sense of a public order, of public responsibility, a new social contract) and not only the incorporation into the political system in the strict sense. In this sense, cultural change, which is obviously a clear target for social movements such as those of women, blacks, gays, etc, was clearly perceived as a crucial political demand of poor urban organized sectors of society.

In addition, in a correlate development, the struggle of social movements has been also directed towards the widening of dominant conceptions of politics itself. Thus, the redefinition of citizenship

undertaken mainly by social movements and other sectors of civil society in Latin America intended to confront the existing boundaries of what is defined as the political arena: its participants, its institutions, its processes, its agenda and its scope (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998). The broadening of the definition of politics in order to make possible the acknowledgement of new subjects, themes, spaces and institutions has been seen as a crucial step towards not simply the reestablishment of democracy in authoritarian countries but rather towards the ‘democratization of democracy’ or its deepening. Both developments, which implied a resignification of citizenship, had strong cultural implications, affecting in significant ways the predominant authoritarian and excluding cultural matrix in Brazil and Latin America. Such a process demonstrated very forcefully the imbrication of culture and politics and represented a powerful drive towards theoretical efforts to conceptualize their relationship. Under the motto “new ways of doing politics”, civil society has been affirmed as a legitimate terrain of politics, as well as the new subjects and the themes emerging in its domain have been asserted as political.

2. The renovation of Marxist theory and Gramsci’s influence on conceptualizing culture

New ways of thinking about the relationship between culture and politics have emerged also in connection with the broader process of theoretical-political renovation which from the beginning of the 1970s has affected both academic critical thinking and the conceptions of the Left in Latin America.

The relationship between culture and politics has not been in itself a privileged or central question in the debate within the Left. Doomed to subordination and negativity, imprisoned in its eternal secondary role and confined to quick last chapters, where its importance is rhetorically reiterated, one cannot say that the cultural problematic has played a visible, fundamental role in the dynamics of that debate. However, in a less spectacular manner than themes such as, for instance, democracy or the historical subject, it seems possible to affirm and to identify a substantial transformation in the ways of thinking about this relationship, as an integral part of Marxism’s renovation process.

In this sense, the general theoretical-political process of renovation in the Left has contributed decisively not only to fracture the straight-jacket that traditional Marxism had imposed on the analysis of culture and its role in social transformation but also brought with it significant conceptual changes in the specific field of cultural analysis. In order to gauge the significance of these changes, it is worth to mention a few features of the previous predominant framework.

Until this process of renovation, the Marxist concept of ideology reigned supreme as the privileged theoretical instrument for the analysis of the relations between culture and politics. Culture, especially popular culture, was the domain of alienation, false consciousness, mystification, in sum, the kingdom of ideology. The primacy of the concept of ideology ended up establishing a trap for cultural studies from which few analysts on the Latin American Left escaped. Its main damage was the impregnation of the cultural realm by negativity. First, it fostered a negativity derived from economic determinism which withdrew from culture any possibility of a dynamic of its own, establishing it as a separate sphere, a mere epiphenomenal expression of an economic “essence”. Second, culture was entrapped in negativity in the sense that ideas—and culture itself—were seen predominantly as obstacles to social transformation, which should thus be eliminated in the masses and replaced by “true knowledge”, by “class consciousness”, through the enlightened action of their true bearers: the intellectuals, the vanguard, the party.

In addition, class reductionism erected in analytical categories the well-known dichotomies which opposed—as two monolithic blocs external to each other—dominant and dominated cultures, bourgeois ideology and working-class culture, examples of what Canclini (1988) calls deductivist approaches in cultural analysis. Dependency theory, formulated by Latin Americans in an effort to adjust Marxist class analysis to the complexity of the new developments of international political economy, maintained this dichotomous approach.

If the relations between culture and politics were approached predominantly through the lenses of ideology theory, politics itself was equated and identified with another ruling concept, the State. Under the heavy influence of Marxist structuralism, the State was conceived as an instance of condensation of power relations and the specific locus of domination in society. As the privileged focus of attention in the analysis of politics and political transformation, the State was considered to be the only decisive arena of power relations and, therefore, the only relevant site and target of political struggle, in what came to be known as a “statist” view of politics. Latin American political culture came to reinforce such a view since a conception of a strong and interventionist State, seen as the main agent of social transformation and historically linked to the building of the nation, has been central to all—conservative and leftist—versions of populist, nationalist, and developmentalist projects.

Thinking about the relation between culture and politics in those terms implied, then, predominantly analyzing the use of culture as an instrument of domination. The strategies of dominant classes seemed to exhaust cultural spaces leaving no room for any other significant effect than their passive acceptance. The impact of the Frankfurt school only contributed to this direction in the analysis of mass media, as did the pervasive reproductionist theories in education (Canclini 1988). The concept of State ideological apparatuses

reached its climax to the extent that, in consummating the marriage between the two reigning concepts, it apparently seemed to effectively account for the dynamics of society.

An important consequence of this theoretical framework was the strengthening in the field of social sciences of a subordinated, marginal conception of the theme of culture itself. With the exception of Anthropology—for which culture has always been a constitutive, fundamental theme but that seldom dealt appropriately with the connections between culture and power relations—among sociologists and political scientists in the Latin American academic Left, culture was considered a secondary, minor subject.

A fundamental input into this process of theoretical renovation came, as discussed above, from social movements themselves and their actual struggles. With this we are not simply acknowledging that such a transformation obviously cannot be understood as endogenous to the field of theory. But we want to emphasize the proactive role of social movements in raising new questions and in generating new directions for theoretical-political analysis. The redefinition of the notion of citizenship, exemplifies this affirmative role of social movements.

From a strictly theoretical perspective, there are a significant number of authors and influences that have contributed to ensuring that the relationships between culture and politics could be reexamined, along a multiplicity of new directions. It is not our purpose to present an assessment of all these influences here but it seems possible to affirm safely that the a specific reading of the contribution of Antonio Gramsci and the influence it exerted in Latin America represented a fundamental rupture in the ways of approaching those relationships. The basis for the renovating impact of Gramscian thought lies in his powerful critique of economic reductionism. This critique asserts a deep imbrication among culture, politics and the economy and establishes an equivalence between material forces and cultural elements within an integrated view of society as a whole. From this premise Gramsci’s work unfolds into a complex and wide ranging reflection whose relevance for our discussion is expressed in a number of points.

The first and obvious point is the conception of hegemony, a process of articulation of different interests around the gradual and always renewed implementation of a project for the transformation of society. The dimension of culture is crucial for the hegemonic process for two fundamental reasons. First, the cultural dimension is critical because hegemony requires in a very strong sense what Gramsci termed an intellectual and moral reform. Second and most importantly (also because not always recognized and properly emphasized), culture is crucial because it is in the terrain of culture that active consent—the specific mode of operation of hegemony, which defines the very concept and distinguishes it from domination—is produced (or not). It is through the concept of hegemony that Gramsci formulates a new way of thinking about the relationship between culture and politics in which the former becomes radically constitutive of the latter.

The second point refers to the Gramscian conception of social transformation, where the revolution is conceived no longer as an insurrectional act of taking over State power but as a process, of which the intellectual and moral reform is an integral part and not a possible consequence. As the revolution is envisaged as the process of building of a new hegemony which implies a new world conception, the role of ideas and culture assumes a positive character. Two crucial formulations underlie this conception of social transformation. The first refers to the very notion of power, understood by Gramsci not as an institution, a “thing” to be seized but as a relation among social forces which must be transformed.

The second is a strong emphasis on the character of historical construction of social transformation as distinct from a fatalist and pre-determined process. As a consequence, the issue of agency or the constitution of subjects is privileged over the dynamics of “objective” social structures and the role to be played by “subjective” elements such as will, passion, faith, received in Gramsci an unprecedented consideration within Marxism.

A third aspect is the emphasis placed by Gramsci on the space of civil society as terrain of political struggle, conceived as a “war of position” in contrast to the “war of movement”, the frontal attack to the State. This emphasis is one of the elements of Gramscian thought that came to play a decisive role in the new directions opened up for the Left in Latin America. It not only implies a revision of the role up to then attributed to the State but also an enlarged view of the space of politics and the plurality of power relations. This multiplication of instances of the political establishes new parameters for the reflection about the relations between culture and politics.

Within this new framework, the relationship between culture and politics loses its externality: whereas previous approaches looked for the “politicization” of culture which usually meant inserting elements of class consciousness into popular culture, culture, as emphasized by Tarcus and Santos, is seen as internally constitutive of politics:

“Cultural politics is not an optional subject, that subject eternally pending in the Left programs, but a subject which does not resist to be simply added to them. Its mere presence questions and forces the reformulation of the whole way in which politics is conceived and practiced. For the lack of a cultural politics on the Left is not the lack of politics for an isolated compartment of the social, for a limited and detachable area, but a symptom, nothing more, nothing less, of a lack of politics at all.

If the conception of culture as the attribution of meanings embedded in all social practices has been established in Anthropology, what the theory of hegemony brought to light was the fact that this attribution of meanings takes place in a context characterized by conflict and power relations. In this sense, the struggle about meanings and who has the power to attribute them is not only a political struggle in itself but it is also inherent and constitutive of all politics.

The new theoretical status conferred to cultural relations and their role in the definition of politics and of social transformation unfolded into a number of consequences for the field of cultural analysis. First, there was a significant change in the approach to popular culture itself. The negativity implicit in traditional Marxist analysis was replaced by a positive regard which emphasized creative autonomy, capacity of symbolic reelaboration and negotiation as features of the cultural practices of subaltern sectors. In a not unusual pattern in intellectual history where antithetical positions temporarily polarize the debate, this positivity appeared, in some versions, as a sheer celebration of “the voice of the people” as the essentialist incarnation of the truth, paralleling the “basismo” which succeeded and reacted against populist and/or authoritarian forms of popular organization. In others, “hegemonic” and “subaltern” cultures became just new denominations for previous deductivist monolithic dichotomies.

Building and deepening democracy

But it was toward the understanding of the new political processes which were then taking shape and the political challenges they posed that the routes opened up by Gramsci’s influence began to be increasingly explored. Thus, the problematic of democracy and the whole set of new correlated questions it implied constituted the scene where the Gramscian boom manifested itself. This particular setting seems to have determined a strong emphasis on the progressive or “revolutionary” possibility of hegemony as a project for the transformation of society.

Such an emphasis contrasts with another readings of the concept, in Europe, for instance, which consistently explored its application to the analysis of the maintenance of the status quo and dominant power relations.

As the military regime slowly retreated, the building and deepening of democracy and citizenship, as both an intellectual and political concern, became the focus of attention. As such a concern has been predominantly dealt with along the lines of “transition” theories and “institutional engineering”, heavily influenced by US political science, the search for new and more radical approaches found in the relationships between culture and politics a crucial fertile terrain for innovation. The two processes we discussed above informed this search. In addition, as the participation of civil society was formally legitimated by the new 1988 Constitution, participatory democracy approaches raised a whole new set of questions emphasizing the centrality of the intersection between culture and politics. Thus, the new public spaces of decision-making that emerged, particularly after the pioneering and successful experience of the Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting, have been first analyzed as instances for the creation and/or dissemination of a more egalitarian culture, a culture of rights, where citizens would be recognized “as subjects bearers of rights, valid aspirations and legitimate interests”. Moreover, since most of these new spaces, such as the Management Councils of Public Policies on health, education, social assistance, children and adolescent and women’s issues, bring together representatives of the government at all levels and of different sectors of society, they became a scenario for the confrontation of cultural differences as an intrinsic element of the necessary political negotiation that must take place in those spaces. The heteroglossia and the diversity of specific knowledges present in public spaces and the power relations they entail became focus of theoretical and empirical research.

After almost two decades of the so-called institutional participation of social movements of various types, empirical research is increasingly showing the difficulties and dilemmas faced by those instances of participatory democracy. A recurrent result may be relevant to our discussion here: in an apparent paradox, the recognition of their positive impact on the process of building a more democratic culture in Brazilian society coexists with the singling out of this same process as the main political challenge faced by public spaces of participation.

In my own recent work, I have been working with a notion of political projects intended to conceptually elaborate the relationships between culture and politics. I use the notion of political project to designate the beliefs, interests, worldviews and representations of what life in society should be, which guide the political action of different subjects. This preliminary definition, clearly linked to Gramscian thought, has an objective clearly related to the contemporary scene of Latin America, characterized by what I call a discursive crisis determined by the perverse confluence of democratic participatory projects and neo liberal projects. Although I cannot go further with this particular discussion, I think my central hypothesis regarding the notion of political projects may be relevant here in order to summarize what I have said before: political projects cannot be reduced to strategies of political action in a strict sense as they express, convey and produce meanings that are a part of wider cultural matrixes. At the same time, distinct political projects are anchored to existing cultural configurations but also elaborate and introduce new elements into them, creating tensions in, and transforming, society’s cultural repertoire. That is why we do not assume that these projects, either in their concrete implementation or in their discursive practices, are exempt from contradictions or endowed with a high level of internal coherence. We must remember that they emerge from, and are elaborated through, the particular histories and contexts that have marked them and with which they sustain a relationship. In this relationship there is, as it were, a constitutive ambiguity: on the one hand, the projects – those that are not conservative – are formulated precisely to confront and modify elements that are present within the histories and contexts to which they belong.

On the other hand, these projects and the practices they guide are not immune to the very traits that they attempt to criticize and hold at bay, given the fact that such traits do represent characteristics of existing Latin American cultural matrixes. An important determinant of the more or less contradictory nature of political projects can thus be found in the ambiguity of their relationship with their environment.

In my view, the conceptualization of culture presided by the perspective of its organic relationship with power and politics has been able to gain space in the work of those concerned with social transformation and democratic deepening, specially in very unequal societies such as those in Latin America. In addition, it has been able to provide a common ground for political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists who look for interdisciplinary approaches, more capable to offer richer analytical frameworks for the understanding of the complexity of contemporary societies and the dilemmas they face today.

¹ Not unusually this resistance is very much linked to institutional academic power relations themselves, coupled with a disciplinary identity and “esprit de corps” which includes the idea of “exclusive property” over concepts or issues considered to be central to particular disciplines.

² For a discussion of the articulation between the right to equality and the right to difference, see Dagnino (2004).

³ Vera da Silva Telles, A Sociedade Civil e a Construção de um Espaço Público, in Os Anos 90: Política e Sociedade no Brasil

⁴ Ironically, this perception became more evident among academics as political authoritarianism imposed by the State slowly weakened.

⁵ For a detailed account of this redefinition, see Dagnino (1998, 2005).

6. For an example, see my own work “Cultural and ideological dependence: Building a theoretical framework”, in Bonilla and Girling, eds. Structures of Dependence, Stanford, 1972, reprinted in Krishna Kumar, ed., Transnational Enterprises: Their Impact on Third World Societies and Cultures, Boulder: Westview Press, 1980.

7. Designating institutions such as the Church, family, trade-unions, educational, legal, political and communications systems, etc, the ideological State apparatuses function “massively and predominantly by ideology” to ensure “the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of production” through the “subjection to the ruling ideology”. (Althusser 1971:133,145,154.)

8. In this connection, it would be an interesting theme for research to investigate the number of women intellectuals engaged in working on cultural subjects.

9. This formulation is from Juan Carlos Portantiero, (“Los usos de Gramsci”, 1977, p.22), one of the first Latin American Gramscians, member of Pasado y Presente, an unique and very influential cultural-political grouping of Gramscians originated in Argentina in 1963 and transferred by exile to Mexico in 1976. For an extended account of Pasado y Presente, see Raul Burgos, “Gramscismos e Gramscianos na Argentina”, 1996, UNICAMP, unpublished research project.

¹⁰ Interesting evidence of Gramsci’s forceful diffusion in Latin America is found in an intelligence report presented to the XVII Conference of American Armed Forces [Conferência dos Exércitos Americanos] in Mar del Plata in 1987 which conferred him the status of “ideologue of the new strategy of the International Communist Movement”, thus adding: “For Gramsci, the method was not the ‘revolutionary taking of power’ but the cultural subversion of society as the immediate step in order to reach power in a progressive, peaceful and permanent way.” (Quoted by Clovis Rossi, Folha de S.Paulo, September 25, 1988, my emphasis.)

11. Horacio Tarcus and Blas de Santos, “Notas para una critica de la razón Burocrática”, Utopias del Sur 4, Buenos Aires, Summer 1990. [original quotation: "La politica cultural no es una materia optativa, la materia eternamente pendiente de los programas de la izquierda, sino una materia tal que no resiste, simplemente, ser adicionada en ellos. Su sola presencia pone en cuestion y obliga a reformular la totalidad de como se concibe y se practica la politica. Pues la ausencia de una politica para la cultura en la izquierda, no es la ausencia de politica para un compartimiento estanco de lo social, para un area delimitada y recortable, sino que es sintoma, ni mas ni menos, de falta de politica a secas."]

12. See Raul Burgos, As Peripécias de Gramsci about the influence of Gramscian hegemony both on the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT, and on El Salvador’s Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional, FMLN.

13. This last tendency seems to have been more developed in advanced capitalist societies. In some cases, the revolutionary potential of hegemony, so crucial to Gramsci’s own thought, was simply ignored and the concept was reduced to designating a “given” of any kind of exercise of dominant power in non-authoritarian modern capitalist societies, its distinction with respect to domination and its specificity as a particular mode of exercising power therefore disregarded. An additional connected difference in these readings of Gramsci is the importance attributed in Latin America to the concept of hegemony crisis, often used to describe the lack of hegemony in our societies and seldom applied to advanced capitalist countries.

¹⁴ This recognition is given even in cases where the evaluation of the more general impact is predominantly negative (Dagnino, 2002).

¹⁵ We can, for example, take the critical position of the project of participatory democracy with regard to clientelist type relationships (Santos, 2004); or that of the neo-liberal project vis-à-vis personalism (Tatagiba, 2003) Thus, for example, certain versions of the notions that we emphasize as the principal themes of the perverse confluences of our times – civil society, participation and citizenship – have roots, and at the same time produce resonance, in the slow emergence of a more egalitarian culture that confronts the various dimensions of the social authoritarianism existing in Latin American societies. Others do no more than provide newer versions of the older story of elitist and restrictive democracy that has characterized the continent’s dominant project over the last few decades.

Interview by Nathan Schneider

Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.

NS: Rather than focusing on “believers” or “atheists,” which are typically the categories that we hear about in the new atheist debates, you write about “a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists.” Who are these people? Why do you choose to address them?

TE: I wanted to move the arguments beyond the usual, rather narrow circuits in order to bring out the political implications of these arguments about God, which hasn’t been done enough. We need to put these arguments in a much wider context. To that extent, in my view, radicals and humanists certainly should be in on the arguments, regardless of what they think about God. The arguments aren’t just about God or just about religion.

NS: Are you urging people to go to church, or to read the Bible, or simply to acknowledge the historical connections between, say, Marxism and Christianity?

TE: I’m certainly not urging them to go to church. I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns. In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological. But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue. There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that. I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment.

NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion. Is religion literature? Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?

TE: No, not at all. I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture—literary and other kinds of culture—tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.

NS: And those are the political challenges?

TE: Largely. Or, if you like, the ethical-political. They were forgotten, or sidelined, and Christianity in particular became a piece of poetry or a piece of mythology. There’s a lot of poetry and mythology in the Bible, to be sure, but it interacts with other kinds of elements, and that’s what I was stressing.

NS: Do you think that these traditions need to be radically reinterpreted for the modern, secular world? Thomas Aquinas is mentioned in your book, but so are—perhaps even more—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Is the religion you’re defending closer to that of the medieval scholastics or to these more recent figures?

TE: I think that the Christian gospel always stands in need of contemporary reinterpretation. Theologians have to determine what kind of discourse, what contemporary way of talking, can best articulate its particular concerns. There should be controversy and debate. While Marx and Freud and others are relevant to the contemporary interpretation of Christianity, that doesn’t mean one rejects tradition and simply concentrates on the present. The present is made out of tradition and out of history. What I’m offering in my book is what I take to be—although it’s couched very often in terms of Marx or Freud or radicalism in general—a fairly traditional interpretation of scripture.

NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.

TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it. Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

NS: There are so many competing claims for supernatural revelation; some people say they adjudicate truth by the Bible, or by papal authority. How do you know one reliable supernatural tradition from another?

TE: Well, you have to argue about it on the basis of reason, and evidence, and analysis, and historical research. In that sense, theology is like any other intellectual discipline. You don’t know intuitively, and you certainly can’t claim to know dogmatically. You can’t simply, in a sectarian way, assert one tradition over another. I don’t think there’s any one template, any one set of guidelines, which will magically identity the correct view. Theology, like any other intellectual discipline, is a potentially endless process of argument. But that’s not to say that anything goes.

NS: One thing that stood out to me was your reassertion of liberation theology, which, for instance, the current pope repudiated when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was concerned that hope for a worldly liberation through revolution would become a substitute for spiritual liberation through Christ.

TE: It would certainly be a big mistake to identify any particular human society with the kingdom of God. If any liberation theology were doing that, then it would be properly rebuked. I don’t think that’s why the pope is averse to it; he’s averse to it anyway because of its politics. It would be a grave mistake to think that we’re talking about the difference between a material revolution and a spiritual one. That would be the kind of gnosticism, or dualism, which Judaism and Christianity challenge. A socialist revolution is quite as spiritual as the fight for the kingdom of God is material.

NS: Do you consider yourself a Christian per se, or a person who happens to like and be inspired by Christianity?

TE: I don’t think the pope will consider me a Christian. I was brought up, of course, a Catholic. I suppose it was fortunate that around the time of the Vatican Council I encountered, just when I might have rejected a lot of it, a very challenging version of Christianity. I felt there was no need to reject it on political and intellectual grounds, because it was highly relevant and sophisticated and engaging. In a sense one doesn’t have much choice about these things. What I find is that heritage very deeply influences my work, and probably has more so over the last few years. Quite what my relation to it now is is hard to say. But that’s just a historical dilemma, a matter of how to understand oneself historically.

NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.

TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.

NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

NS: Are there political reasons behind this mistake?

TE: Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it. I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off. I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.” It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places. It crops up at the very temples of Mammon. But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions. That’s a pretty comfortable debate. But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that. It has a strong political subtext.

NS: Back to issues of faith and reason—your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magesteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.

TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position. What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous. They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason. Then theologians can say anything they like. They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument. They’re now released from the tenets of science. Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism. But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason. The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason. Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself. But that’s a false way of arguing. Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.

NS: The atheists have promoted themselves by wearing big red “A”s on their t-shirts and calling themselves “brights.” Is there a counter-movement you’d like to begin? What would you put on the t-shirt?

TE: Rather than simply man the barricades on either side, I’d like to step back and see what’s happening here. That sort of gesture has to be understood in terms of an American society in which a relatively small coterie of self-consciously enlightened atheists or agnostics are indeed confronted with a massively ideologized religion, which in many respects is very ugly indeed. What I think is wrong, and what I think is rationalistic, is to cast the argument in terms of intelligence. It may be that a lot of people who believe that they’re going to be rapt up into heaven are fairly dim creatures. On the other hand, Europe is full of dim agnostics. It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid. That betrays what’s wrong with this particular kind of new atheism: it casts the arguments largely in intellectual and propositional terms and doesn’t see that a great deal else is involved here.

NS: Do you think that it’s an accident that the most successful of the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, come with English accents?

TE: No. England is a very agnostic society. It looks with amazement on the behavior of many Americans as far as religion goes. America, of course, is in all kinds of ways out of line. It’s still an enormously metaphysical and religious society, while the typical advanced capitalist culture is pretty skeptical. Advanced capitalist societies do not normally call upon their citizens to believe very much, as long as they roll out of bed and do their work. They are pretty post-metaphysical. In a sense, Britain is a post-metaphysical society. A very small minority of people go to church. Religion is not part of a public and political discourse in anything like the way it is in the States. The States is peculiar because it is, on the one hand, the most rampantly capitalist society in history and, on the other, deeply, deeply metaphysical. Really, those two things are inherently at odds. Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing, and secularizing. But to prop them up, to defend them, and to legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values. That may be why there are a lot of psycho-spiritual stockbrokers around.

Read original post at The Immanent Frame

John D. Cameron
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

A better understanding of the differences between the ‘public performances’ and ‘backstage commentaries’ of poor and marginalized people in participatory budget schemes is important for both development practitioners and scholars. For practitioners, it is important to recognize that people may take part in participatory budget meetings to pursue goals that are very different from those of well-intended government officials and NGO staff. The divergence of popular goals and strategies from those of development professionals does not necessarily imply the ignorance or false-consciousness of poor and marginalized people, but rather may reflect a well-grounded skepticism of externally- driven development schemes and conceptions of development that vary from those of governments and donor agencies. I am not arguing that the strategies or knowledge of participants is either superior or inferior to that of outside development professionals, simply that it may be difficult to pursue some important long-term development goals – such as increased economic productivity and improved health – through participatory budget schemes in which local actors may prioritize more immediate short-term goals such as income earned through cement projects. At the same time, the widespread prioritization of small-scale cement projects in participatory budget meetings in the rural Andes should lead practitioners to reflect on the capacity of projects designed to serve long-term development goals to also serve the immediate priorities of local participants.

For scholars working from both mainstream institutionalist and more critical political economy and Foucauldian perspectives, it is important to recognize that the behaviour of participants in participatory budget meetings cannot be inferred from either the institutional design of participatory budgets or the intent of the donor and government agencies behind them. The involvement of poor and marginalized people in participatory budget schemes should not be confused with compliance with the goals of those schemes.

The subtle and hidden forms of agency that poor and marginalized people exercise within participatory budgets spaces should not be romanticized as resistance to ‘good governance’ initiatives intended to promote neoliberal globalization, but nor should it be overlooked. For practitioners and scholars alike, a greater understanding of the infrapolitics of participatory budgets requires more careful interpretation of what participants say and do not say in participatory budget meetings and a recognition that what they reveal quietly outside of those meetings may be more indicative of their priorities than what they say in public.

Read full article at allacademic

By Sam Binkley, Emerson College

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a best selling book on financial advice written by Robert T. Kiyosaki. Originally self-published in 1997 as supporting material for Kiyosaki’s financial advice lectures, and later picked up by Warner Business Books in 2000, the text relates a rich allegorical narrative about the mental hard wiring required for financial success, and the concealed “ways of thinking” practiced by the wealthy. Kiyosaki’s method is comparative: he tells of his childhood relationships with two fathers; one a biological parent, the other a friend’s father who undertook the task of young Robert’s financial education. Each father presented radically distinct outlooks on financial life. His own father, the poor dad, was a government man, head of the Department of Education for the state of Hawaii who, in spite of his impressive qualifications and career accomplishments, remained “poor” his whole life, snarled in a plodding, credentialist faith in institutional advancement as a slow climb up the ladder of bureaucratic hierarchy. The rich dad, on the other hand, was a self-made millionaire with an eighth grade education who held a deep distain for the naïve approach to wealth generation practiced by the majority of Americans—one that conceived of earned reward in terms of educational credentials and the patient advance to higher salaried positions within a single firm. Throughout the book, poor dad’s dour lectures on the virtues of patience, loyalty and circumspection were contrasted with rich dad’s exhortations to swashbuckling fiscal adventurism, self-interest and self-responsibility. Kiyosaki compares the advice offered by his two dads:

My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought…
One dad recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to work for.”
The other recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to buy.”
One dad said, “the reason I’m not rich is because I have you kids.”
The other said, “the reason I must be rich is because I have you kids.”
One said “when it comes to money, play it safe, don’t take risks.” The other said,
“learn to manage risk.”

At first blush, the case of Rich Dad Poor Dad might seem innocuous enough: another proselytizing tome in a long tradition of entrepreneurial boosterism extending from Horatio Alger through Norman Vincent Peale to Donald Trump—a discourse on fis-cal self-realization extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship and voluntarism as a personal ethic. Yet what distinguishes this example is not just its timeliness given the current zeal for anti-welfarist, anti-statist rhetoric, and its veneration for market cowboyism, (nor it’s stunning popularity, becoming a New York Times best selling title in 2002), but the specific way in which it dramatizes the dynamism within this space, what we might describe as the inner life of the neoliberal subject. This space is characterized by a specific tension between the inertia of social dependency and the exuberance and vitality of market agency—a tension that is, in Kiyosaki’s prose, barbed with exhortations to mobilize the latter against the former.

In what follows, the provocations posed by Kiyosaki’s tale of two dads will provide a backdrop for an inquiry into debates around what has come to be termed “neoliberal governmentality.” I take this term to indicate the ways in which subjects are governed as market agents, encouraged to cultivate themselves as autonomous, self-interested individuals, and to view their resources and aptitudes as human capital for investment and return. Neoliberal governmentality presumes a more or less continuous series that runs from those macro-technologies by which states govern populations, to the micro-technologies by which individuals govern themselves, allowing power to govern individuals “at a distance,” as individuals translate and in-corporate the rationalities of political rule into their own methods for conducting themselves. However, in much recent work on governmentality, the emphasis has fallen on the institutional logics, the assemblages, technologies and dispositifs, as Foucault called them, through which the rationalities of neoliberal governmentality invest populations, while less emphasis has been placed on the practical, ethical work individuals perform on themselves in their effort to become more agentive, decisionistic, voluntaristic and vital market agents. The tale of Rich Dad Poor Dad reminds us of the dynamic practices by which neoliberal governmentalities are incorporated. Moreover, it suggests that these practices are ethical, in the sense that Foucault used the term in his later work: they involve daily work performed upon specific objects or features of the self held to be problematic—“ethical substances,” as Foucault called them, which in this case implicates and acts upon the embodied, moribund collectivist dependencies and dispositions that are the legacy of poor dad’s mode of existence.

Read full article at Foucault Studies

By Noam Chomsky

The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in the words of George Washington. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal.

Latin America has retained its primacy in U.S. global planning. If the United States cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world,” observed President Richard M. Nixon’s National Security Council in 1971, when Washington was considering the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile.

Recently the hemisphere problem has intensified. South America has moved toward integration, a prerequisite for independence; has broadened international ties; and has addressed internal disorders—foremost, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering.

The problem came to a head a year ago in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, where, in 2005, the indigenous majority elected a president from its own ranks, Evo Morales.

In August 2008, after Morales’ victory in a recall referendum, the opposition of U.S.-backed elites turned violent, leading to the massacre of as many as 30 government supporters.

In response, the newly-formed Union of South American Republics (UNASUR) called a summit meeting. Participants—all the countries of South America—declared “their full and firm support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a big majority.”

“For the first time in South America’s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States,” Morales observed.

Another manifestation: Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa has vowed to terminate Washington’s use of the Manta military base, the last such base open to the United States in South America.

In July, the U.S. and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the United States to use seven military bases in Colombia.

The official purpose is to counter narcotics trafficking and terrorism, “but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations” told the Associated Press “that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations.”

The agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to U.S. military supplies, according to reports. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of U.S. military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category).

Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s. The correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.

The AP also cited an April 2009 document of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, which proposes that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a “cooperative security location.”

From Palanquero, “nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling,” the document states. This could form part of “a global en route strategy,” which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa.”

On Aug. 28, UNASUR met in Bariloche, Argentina, to consider the U.S. military bases in Colombia.

After intense debate, the final declaration stressed that South America must be kept as “a land of peace,” and that foreign military forces must not threaten the sovereignty or integrity of any nation of the region. And it instructed the South American Defense Council to investigate the Air Mobility Command document.

The bases’ official purpose did not escape criticism. Morales said he witnessed U.S. soldiers accompanying Bolivian troops who fired at members of his coca growers union.

“So now we’re narco-terrorists,” he continued. “When they couldn’t call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists.” He warned that “the history of Latin America repeats itself.”

The ultimate responsibility for Latin America’s violence lies with U.S. consumers of illegal drugs, Morales said: “If UNASUR sent troops to the United States to control consumption, would they accept it? Impossible.”

That the U.S. justification for its drug programs abroad is even regarded as worthy of discussion is yet another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality.

Last February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy issued its analysis of the U.S. “war on drugs” in past decades.

The commission, led by former Latin American presidents Fernando Cardoso (Brazil), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), and Cesar Gaviria (Colombia), concluded that the drug war had been a complete failure and urged a drastic change of policy, away from forceful measures at home and abroad and toward much less costly and more effective measures — prevention and treatment.

The commission report, like earlier studies and the historical record, had no detectable impact. The non-response reinforces the natural conclusion that the “drug war”—like the “war on crime” and “the war on terror”—is pursued for reasons other than the announced goals, which are revealed by the consequences.

During the past decade, the United States has increased military aid and training of Latin American officers in light infantry tactics to combat “radical populism”—a concept that, in the Latin American context, sends shivers up the spine.

Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, eliminating human rights and democracy provisions formerly under congressional supervision, always weak but at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses.

The U.S. Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated in 2008, shortly after Colombia’s invasion of Ecuador, with responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the surrounding waters.

Its “various operations include counter-illicit trafficking, Theater Security Cooperation, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training,” the official announcement says.

Militarization of South America aligns with much broader designs. In Iraq, information is virtually nil about the fate of the huge U.S. military bases there, so they presumably remain for force projection. The cost of the immense city-with-in-a-city embassy in Baghdad is to rise to $1.8 billion a year, from an estimated $1.5 billion.

The Obama administration is also building mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The United States and United Kingdom are demanding that the U.S. military base in Diego Garcia be exempted from the planned African nuclear-weapons-free-zone—as U.S. bases are off-limits in similar zoning efforts in the Pacific.

In short, moves toward “a world of peace” do not fall within the “change you can believe in,” to borrow Obama’s campaign slogan.

Original post at In These Times

By Simon Crhichley

“(…) is politics conceivable without religion? The answer is obviously affirmative as the evidence of various secular political theories testifies. But is politics practicable without religion? That is the question. And that is the question that Rousseau’s thinking of politics faces. Can politics become effective as a way of shaping, motivating and mobilizing a people or peoples without some sort of dimension—if not foundation—that is religious, that is without some sort of appeal to transcendence, however substantive or otherwise that appeal might be? I do not think so. Or rather, I no longer think so. Thus, the exemplarity of Rousseau to my mind consists in the fact that he gives us the definitive expression of the modern conception of politics: that is, politics is the break with any conception of nature and natural law and has to be based in the concepts of popular sovereignty, association, rigorous equality and collective autonomy understood as the self-determination of a people. And yet, in order for this modern conception of politics to become effective it has to have a religious dimension, a moment of what the Romans used to call theologia civilis, civil theology. That is, the secularization that seems to define modern politics has to acknowledge a moment of what Emilio Gentile calls sacralization, the transformation of a political entity like a state, nation, class or party into a sacred entity, which means that it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable and intangible. So, can a political collectivity maintain itself in existence, that is, maintain its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, that is, without religion, rituals and something that we can only call belief? Once again, I do not think so. Might we not at least conceive of the possibility of redefining the secularization that is believed to be definitive of modernity with the idea of modern politics as a metamorphosis of sacralization, where modern forms of politics, whether liberal democracy, fascism, soviet communism, national socialism and the rest have to be grasped as new articulations and, indeed, mutations of the sacred? Before continuing, it should be noted that I have come to this conclusion with no particular joy, as someone with little enthusiasm (in the literal sense of the term) for religion, whether organized or disorganized. And I say this not simply in response to the chronic re-theologization of politics through which we are living, which makes this time certainly the darkest period in my lifetime, and arguably for much longer. At the heart of the horror of the present is the intrication of politics and religion, an intrication defined by violence, and this is what I would like to begin to think through. I want to do this not in order to break the connection between politics and religion, but to acknowledge the limitations of any completely secular leftist politics. It seems to me that the left has all too easily ceded the religious ground to the right and it is this ground that needs to be regained in a coherent, long-term and tenacious political war of position. As Gramsci famously wrote, ‘socialism is the religion that is needed to kill off Christianity’. As we will see presently, the relation of politics to religion and their intrication raises for me the question of the necessity of fiction, of both the seeming necessity for a divine fiction at the basis of politics and the possibility of what Wallace Stevens would call a supreme fiction in politics.”

Read if full at Continental Philosophy Review

MST releases photo and public note to society:

The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) comes to public to manifest his grief again for the loss of companheiro Elton Brum loss, to manifest  solidarity to the family and for:

1. To denounce one more harsh and violent action of the Military Police of Rio Grande do Sul, what resulted in Elton Brum murder, 44 years, two children’s father, natural of Canguçu, during the forced eviction of Southall Farm occupation in São Gabriel. The information on the eviction shows that Brum was murdered when the situation was already controlled and there was no resistance. There are indications that he has been murdered by the backs.

2. To denounce that besides the landless worker death, the action still resulted in dozens of injured, including women and children, with wounds of splinters, swords and bitten of dogs.

3. We denounced Governor Yeda Crusius, hierarchal commander of the Military Police, responsible for a politics of criminalization of the social movements and of violence against the urban and rural workers. The use of firearms to deal with social movements reveals that the violence is part of the politics of this State. The criminalization is not an exception, but it is the rule and an unpopular government’s need, to service of obscure interests and to remain in the power by force.

4. We denounced Colonel Lauro Binsfield, Commander of the Military Police, whose report includes other disarray actions, cruelty and violence against the workers, as in the March 8, 2008, when he repeated the same methods against the women of Via Campesina.

5. We denounced the Judiciary Power that impeded the expropriation and the emission of ownership of Fazenda Antoniasi, where Elton Brum would be seated. His life would have been saved if the Judiciary Power was to service of Federal Constitution and not of interests of local oligarchies.

6. We denounced State Public Prosecution service in São Gabriel (MPE – Ministério Público Estadual) that was omitted when the seated families demanded the liberation of resources already available for the construction of the school for 350 families, of which kids now will lose the school year, and for health, what already costed three children’s life. The same MPE was omitted in the moment of the action, in front of the violence they witnessed in the field. And now they come to public to eulogize Military Police action as professional.

7. To recall the Brazilian society that rural social movements have been denouncing for more than one year that there is a criminalization politics from Yeda Crusius Government to the Commission of Human Rights of the Senate, to the Special Department for Human Rights, to Agrarian Audit and to OAS – Organization of American States. The omission of the authorities and the disrespect of the Governor to any institution and to democracy resulted today in a fatal victim.

8. To reaffirm that we will follow demanding the settlement of all families camped in Rio Grande do Sul and the infrastructure conditions to implement the settlements foreseen to São Gabriel.

We demanded Justice and Punishment to the Criminals!

For our dead, not even a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle!

Land reform, for social justice and popular sovereignty!

Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

(English version by me)