Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America

Translator’s Note

This is not Latin America.

That was the retort one of my colleagues gave in response to our discussion of how best to organize the student body. It was our first collective meeting in support of a compañera who was unable to secure enough funding from our academic institution to support them in their graduate studies program. Prior to this meeting, we had shared stories and examples from other parts of the country and the world on how best to confront the exploitative power of the neoliberal institution. Some of us brought up examples from South Africa and Chile, regions of the world where students had recently occupied administrative spaces and subverted the hierarchies that upheld structures of power in higher education. We mentioned the #FeesMustFall movement of South Africa, where students had taken over administrative halls and established popular assemblies in a months-long struggle to fight fee increases at University of Witwatersrand, a movement that quickly spread to other campuses across South Africa. We talked about Chile in 2011, where a highly selective voucher program placed higher education out of reach for many working-class students. That year, student protests led to what came to be known as the long Chilean winter, during which students at all levels of schooling confronted the privatized education system. At the time, Chilean students made connections with the historical struggles of the Mapuche, the Indigenous peoples of Wallmapu, what is today commonly known as Chile.

However, what had initially started with support from the entire graduate student body in our department, ultimately dwindled to a handful of us.

While the reactionary quip, this is not Latin America, may seem like an apropos announcement given the meek mobilizations in the US in contrast to other places, it stands in sharp contrast with the resounding calls of solidarity from yesteryear. In the mid- to late-twentieth century, groups like the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and others read their local struggles alongside the fight against occupations, dispossession, and imperialism abroad. Not to mention, campuses across the US were forming strong bonds with movements across the world, such as the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University. A former college organizer himself, it was Stokely Carmichael whose resounding 1967 call for Black Power, made the analogy between Black subjugation in the urban ghettos and colonialism abroad. Noting the ghetto’s colonial patterns, Carmichael and his coauthor Charles V. Hamilton described the politics of Blackness as one predicated on communality, arguing that capitalism stood in contrast to these formations as it reinforced racial hierarchies because it was rooted in the subjugation of poor folks in a manner not unlike the colonies abroad. Yet, since then, the most visible movements for social change in the United States, including those on campuses, have seemingly interpellated Fukuyama’s dictum of the end of history.¹

What happened?

The statement this is not Latin America, can be interpreted as a projection of the training received in the very institution we were looking to change. The pushback and paternalistic response we received from some of our colleagues in our attempts to connect with struggles abroad reflected many of the characteristics of Area Studies. Referring to the interdisciplinary field of research that folds diverse knowledge systems into particular geographical and cultural regions, Area Studies emerged in the post-WWII period and rose concurrently with the counterinsurgent movement that took place in the US. Just like the disciplinary field of Area Studies, it seems like the left, broadly defined, has similarly come to compartmentalize and provincialize the understanding of struggles abroad. Trading a long legacy of solidarity for Fukuyama’s dictum that we are at the end of history, it seems as if the pessimism of the intellect has bled into the will of the people.

The closest revival of internationalism, like the one seen in the 1960s, would not take place until the 2008 financial crisis, when many of us here in the US were looking for models of alternative political practices to escape crisis and reimagine another world. We became inspired, for example, by the tomas of occupied factories in Argentina just a few years earlier. The Occupy movement began with the renaming of Freedom Square in New York and became part of the cartography of resistance along with the uprisings in Tahrir, Gaza, Greece, Spain, Brazil, and other places across the globe.

Spending time in these encampments, I was introduced to a myriad of ideas, new concepts, and social structures through the various colloquies and teach-ins that had formed. Concepts like horizontality and decentralized assemblies provided us with a new repertoire to reframe and reimagine our own organizing strategies. Occupy became a space for us to recover some of the lost assemblages and networks of the past as we learned from the shared struggles of movements abroad.

One of the best reporters of such movements is Raúl Zibechi. Those of us who read Spanish or have managed to get our hands on his few texts that have been translated into English, have found an astute interlocutor between theory and practice. Accompanying various societies in movement across the southern continent, Zibechi is less an academic and more a fellow traveler, learning from communities that are constructing worlds beneath and against Latin American modernity.

In addition to rejecting the commitments to academic professionalism, Zibechi rejects the conformity that established political institutions call for. This allows Zibechi to recognize through his travels that the revolutionary path is much less linear than the traditional left has made it out to be. What Zibechi reminds us of is that, despite being in a post-Marxist epoch, we have nonetheless retained many of its dialectical frameworks, even after these frameworks were already being questioned by thinkers like Walter Benjamin.

Today, while much of the left, broadly defined, remains committed to state-centric frameworks and approaches, the most dynamic movements in Latin America have drawn upon ancestral knowledges and place-based politics to imagine worlds otherwise. This was a reality the proto-Zapatista movement was embarrassingly confronted with early on in their uprising when seeking out recruits deep in the jungles of Chiapas.

Zibechi’s work forces us to question the frameworks that we—here referring to those concerned with the construction of other worlds—have taken too seriously, as well as the sociological terms used for understanding struggle and resistance. One of these notions is that of understanding change as occurring in totality. To collapse the history of resistance in the United States as part of a totality is to absolve power and reduce it to an incidental, something Zibechi vividly describes at various points throughout the text that follows. Emphasizing a totality is to ignore the fact that the dehumanization of Black life and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples were interrelated mechanisms of statecraft on which the United States was founded. Totality also works to presume that the only modes of resistance in the US are centered on civil rights, appeals to the State, and in its most radical instance, the acquisition of power itself. Totality was one of the fatal flaws I found in the Occupy movement, as it failed to understand and grasp its internal particularities, ultimately giving way to its contradictions.

The concept of societies or pueblos in movement, which Zibechi is most known for, breaks the stranglehold that the idea of totality has on our understanding of what resistance is and how change occurs. To understand society in the plural reverts our gaze to the otherwise. It takes seriously the subversive and alternative formulations we have long missed or overlooked. At the same time, it helps us to reconstruct new bridges while reassembling the networks required to create worlds otherwise.

George Ygarza Quispe

Paterson, February 2023

1. An American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama had by the end of the Cold War captured the sentiments of the neoconservative class by declaring that the fall of Communism seemingly brought a close to humanity’s search for a sociopolitical pax. In his book, The End of History and the Last Man, he argues Western liberal democracies were in themselves the final historical epoch.

Preface to the English Edition

The 1960s were prodigious for antisystemic movements and struggles for collective emancipation. Among the many virtues of this period, I would like to recall that it allowed us to better understand the struggles of the peoples of the world with much greater precision than what happened in the years before and since. More than any other, it was during this period that we were able to feel the violence and pain of peoples in other parts of the world as Che Guevara proclaimed in his passionate interventions.

During this time, it was not necessary to build bridges between the struggles of the North and the South, because common sense said that we suffered for the same reasons, closely linking imperialism with capitalism. The roots of the liberatory struggles of colonized countries, of people who suffered because of their skin color and of those who lived tormented by patriarchy and machismo, converged into a single torrent of indignation bell hooks would later formulate.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that in my small town of Montevideo in Uruguay, the main left-wing newspaper, Marcha, led by Eduardo Galeano, would send us a monthly compilation of documents from the different movements from around the world. When we received a notebook entitled Black Power, our hearts jumped with enthusiasm to learn about the powerful and revealing anticapitalist experiences of the Black social movement of that time in the US such as the Black Panther Party.

It is not difficult to imagine that many young Americans would have also jumped upon receiving news of the resistances of Cuba or Vietnam, that upon hearing about the Tet Offensive in 1969, had similar enthusiasm with which they attended the March on Washington and listened to Martin Luther King’s famous speech on August 28, 1963. The condemnation by Martin Luther King and others of the United States’s treatment of Black people resonated around the planet and was understood as something of its own by millions of people who were not African American but felt similar pains.

We called it internationalism, but it was just the common sense of the time for those of us who felt that the world was an unfair place and needed to change. We said revolution without imagining that soon this word would be demonized, becoming synonymous with terrorism thanks to the counterinsurgent role that the monopolized media began to play. But in those times, we were happy celebrating every victory of antisystemic struggles taking place in every corner of the planet.

Then came the terrible years of the conservative counter­revolution and we all retreated, pushed further down by conservative policies that threatened dissent everywhere.

For Latin America these were dark times, years of repression in which a few former rebels even joined the systems they once opposed, most often in high positions in companies or the State. But most of those who were with us turned inward to satisfy their own individual desires, not caring too much about the rest of humanity. This did not happen in just one country or on one single continent, but everywhere, as globalization has shown us that the whole planet is impacted in very similar ways.

Out of this darkness came January 1, 1994, which, at least for those of us in Latin America, was a light of hope, rebellion, and love that made our dreams come true. Thirty years have now passed and many of us still feel the same emotions from that early morning of the new year, when we saw thousands of Indigenous people with their faces covered occupying cities in southern Mexico.

I know that in the United States many people felt similarly. In May, I was able to attend the El Sur Resiste caravan, organized by the National Indigenous Congress. The caravan began in Chiapas and toured seven states in support of resistance against megaprojects, and I was not surprised to find a large delegation from California. The Zapatista struggle has awakened the dormant internationalism.

In the same way, in this part of the world we celebrate the Sioux resistance to the construction of the pipeline in Standing Rock and the broad alliance between native peoples of the United States, as well as the solidarity that it inspired, bringing together religious figures, Vietnam veterans, ecologists, and various social movements. We also celebrate the numerous mobilizations of Black people including Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, struggles articulated in the streets responding to police abuses.

I also resonate with struggles like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that found itself in dialogue with the Commune of Oaxaca (2006), given that they opened urban spaces as a way to find other ways of living, even for only a brief time. I am also able to recognize the way in which Cooperation Jackson is in dialogue with the network of cooperatives of CECOSESOLA, the solidarity association of cooperatives in Venezuela. Beyond the details about the way they operate, and the number of people involved, both register strong anticapitalist approaches.

We are learning that in this system there are no definitive victories, because the thousands of tentacles of the Capitalist Hydra (as the Zapatistas call it) attack in every imaginable place. After Standing Rock, this system has now set its sights on Canada, with the attempt to build the Coastal GasLink pipeline on the land of the Wet’suwet’en people. The Capitalist Hydra does not rest.

We have also learned that structural and monocultural projects are part of the system, exceeding the will of a government because large corporations accumulate capital by destroying people and nature without the slightest shame. These initiatives are part of a structural feature of capitalism today: accumulation by dispossession, a concept formulated by the geographer David Harvey. The only difference is that in the territories of the pueblos this accumulation takes the form of a war of dispossession, because this system militarily invades our territories to impose its projects.

Another lesson we learned is that violence against the Black population and against the Indigenous peoples of Latin America is exactly the same, because it pursues the same objectives with similar structural characteristics. Let me explain: for the elites, we the poor pueblos are merely a surplus population, we do not serve them even for exploitation, as they no longer need us as workers or even as servants. That is why we are seeing health care systems and public education continue to worsen.

Faced with this reality, we need to build our own worlds like the Black Panthers did in the past and as the Zapatistas are doing today. Committed to the survival of Black peoples, the Panthers set up community and social programs that were, by 1969, part of their main organizing structure. From free breakfast programs and education programs for children, to community health clinics where diseases such as tuberculosis were treated. As a whole, these organizing structures comprised what could be seen as a different society, in the same way the original and Black peoples in Latin America are building today.

Given the almost permanent mobilization of sectors of the Black population in the United States, it is easy for me to find resonance with my conceptualization of people on the move or societies in movement. In the US, the term peoples, which I find to be the best translation of the commonly used Latin American term pueblo, has fallen out of fashion within the broader left. Yet, when we take the context and the historic moment of resistance into account, it seems to still be the most fitting. In the 1960s, pueblos en movimientos, or peoples on the move, was undoubtedly appropriate, not least because it was a sector of society that mobilized organically while building social relations different from the hegemonic ones, as can be seen from the aforementioned social programs. But societies in movement are not a permanent establishment, simply because state repression and persecution have set it back both in its organization and consciousness.

However, there are other similarities here with Latin American struggles. When we hear Malcolm X demand that his people not consume tobacco or alcohol, it reminds us of the decision of the Zapatista women to ban drinking in their own communities to prevent men from beating them or weakening the organization.

When I observe the Zapatistas during their encounters of women who struggle, I cannot help but recall the statement put out by the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s announcing the emergence of a new feminism from below. There is an implicit dialogue between the feminism of Black lesbian women and that of the Mayan Zapatistas, which speaks to us of the overlapping oppression of class, race, and gender, something invisible to white academic women.

Yesterday and today, and always, the struggles of peoples are interwoven, linked together under the line of visibility, to the point that some inspire others, and they learn from them, overcoming distances and the most diverse geographies. The most remarkable thing, however, is that, to weave these links neither parties nor leaders, nor large organizational apparatuses are necessary, because relations are forged by the common sense of the peoples in resistance. We only need to sharpen the senses to discover them and follow in their footsteps. But we must be very careful when it comes to intervening, because experience tells us that any interference can cause irreparable damage to these peoples. Let us trust in the wisdom and instincts of those who have been resisting much more powerful forces for centuries and, at times, managed to build fragments of new worlds against the grain of oppression.

Raúl Zibechi

Montevideo, May 2023

Introduction

Those of us who are part of the anticapitalist camp are caught in the following paradox: while we have come to accept that