The Failure of Latin America

Postcolonialism in Bad Times

John Beverley

• Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780822986904
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Weltgeschichte

The Failure of Latin America is a collection of John Beverley's previously published essays and pairs them with new material that reflects on questions of postcolonialism and equality within the context of receding continental socialism. Beverley sees an impasse within both the academic postcolonial project and the Bolivarian idea of Latin America. The Pink Tide may have failed to permanently reshape Latin America, but in its failure there remains the possibility of an alternative modernity not bound to global capitalism. Beverley proposes that equality, modified by the postcolonial legacy, is a particularly Latin American possibility that can break the impasse and redefine Latinamericanism.

1

DEPENDENCY THEORY AND THE APORIAS OF LATIN AMERICAN MODERNITY

IT HAS been almost sixty years since the victory of the Cuban Revolution thrust dependency theory onto the center stage of Latin American history and policy. In that time its fortunes rose and fell dramatically (and then moved east toward China), only to rise again with the resurgence of the governments of the Pink Tide, now, however, in a somewhat chastened albeit still compelling form. Why still compelling? The new governments of the Left between 2000 and 2015 were, in different ways, seeking to move away from the hegemony of neoliberal economics, and the accompanying focus on the social sciences in civil society and the new social movements, by restoring emphasis on the role of the state and interstate cooperation in national and regional economic planning. Why chastened? Chastened because of the question posed to the underlying assumptions of dependency theory precisely by civil society and the new social movements: Planning to what end? That question involves in turn two goals that are at once interrelated and antagonistic: modernity (development) and difference.

In many ways the argument between capitalism and socialism that framed the Cold War was an argument about which of the two systems could best carry forward the possibility of a political, scientific, cultural, and economic modernity latent in capitalism itself. The basic premise of socialism as a modernizing ideology, represented by both communism and social democracy, was that capitalism could not complete its own promise of emancipation and material well-being, given its inherent contradictions between the social character of the forces of production and the private character of ownership and capital accumulation. Freeing the forces of production from the fetters of capitalist relations of production—so the familiar argument went—the state socialist or nationalist regimes would soon overcome these limitations, inaugurating an era of unprecedented economic growth, which in turn would be the material precondition for socialism. The eventually triumphant (although today somewhat frayed at the edges) response of capitalism was that the force of the globalized free market would be more dynamic and efficient in the long run in producing modernity and economic growth.

What was not in question on either side of this argument was the desirability of modernity as such. Dependency theory in particular revealed itself to be somewhat ideologically promiscuous on this point. For if dependency theory was essentially an explanation of the “underdevelopment” of the peripheral countries with respect to a supposedly “completed” political, economic, technological, and cultural modernity in the advanced capitalist countries of the center, then modernity became the norm against which to judge the more or less abject (“lumpen,” to recall André Gunder Frank’s characterization of the Latin American bourgeoisie) condition of this or that peripheral country or regional formation, and the free market, import-substitution policies, Keynesian welfare-state capitalism, or socialism were simply means to achieve that modernity—means which should be evaluated in the last instance by their pragmatic efficiency in producing this goal.

Jürgen Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality expresses the prospect of a society that is, or that could become, transparent to itself. This is what he means by modernity. But what opposes the universalization of communicative rationality is not only the conflict of tradition and modernity—that is, the “incompleteness” of modernity, to borrow Habermas’s own phrase (Habermas 1996)—but also the intensification of forms of social heterogeneity and difference produced in part by the very process of capitalist modernity itself. As Guillermo O’Donnell and other Latin American political scientists began to notice in the 1970s in the wake of the Southern Cone dictatorships, economic modernization in Latin America did not always sustain secularization and democratization, but it seemed to often require instead, perversely, deeply reactionary and repressive bureaucratic-authoritarian forms of government.

The basic premise of dependency theory was that the structural position of the Third World in the world economic order inhibited economic development, especially industrialization and the formation of a vigorous internal commodities market, and thus also the maturation of its nation-states. It posited therefore the need for peripheral states like those of Latin America to “delink” from the metropolitan economic centers in order to achieve autonomous national development. The equation between the nation-state and “development” rests on the premise that the raison d’étre of the state is to incorporate the population located within its borders into its own putative rationality. The population, or sectors of it (and especially the peasantry, trapped in “rural idiocy,” to recall Marx’s unfortunate characterization), is said to “lag behind” modernity (expressed as instrumental reason and industrialization). That lag, in turn, is seen as a consequence of “underdevelopment,” and underdevelopment in turn as a consequence of “dependency.”

In the context of the colonial and postcolonial world in particular, the idea of ungovernability expresses the incommensurability between what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) calls the “radical heterogeneity” of actual populations and the colonial state’s own rationality or claim to rationality. Ungovernability is the zone of recalcitrance, disobedience, marginality, anachronism, interruption, and insurgency within colonial rule (or today within globalization, which is built over the traces of the European colonial system). The colonial and then the postcolonial state are molded from below by resistance and insurgence, which forces it to modify its goals, strategies, and form. As Ranajit Guha put it apropos the interaction between peasant rebellions and the British colonial state in India, “The formative layers of the developing state were ruptured again and again by these seismic upheavals until it was to learn to adjust to its unfamiliar site by trial and error and consolidate itself by the increasing sophistication of legislative, administrative, and cultural controls” (Guha 1983, 12).

Ungovernability also “interrupts” the developmental narrative of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the apparently teleological passage through the different stages of capitalism envisioned by Marx and his followers (recall that Marx justified the colonization of India because it would mean an end to feudalism). But Marx’s own account of the stages of capitalism, and in particular the distinction between the regimes of competitive and monopoly capital (or absolute and relative surplus value accumulation), is also founded on the effects on and within capitalism itself of class struggle—the century-long struggle to limit the working day, whose description is at the center of volume one of Capital. For Marx the economic history of capitalism is not immanent to capitalism but is precisely the consequence of class struggle. Like Guha’s peasant rebellions, proletarian class struggle is also a form of ungovernability that “interrupts” and redirects the teleology of capitalist development itself.

Let me develop this point by detouring briefly to consider Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the “multitude” in their well-known book Empire (2000), which consciously bid to be something like a Communist Manifesto for our times. For Hardt and Negri, the multitude is a way of naming an emerging transnational working class that is not limited to the category of wage labor and is no longer bound to the nation-state. We know, of course, that the idea of the subaltern played a similar role for Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks. Beyond its usefulness as a euphemism to placate the prison censors—Gramsci could write “subaltern social groups” instead of workers and peasants—the idea of the subaltern allowed him to register forms of contradiction and subordination that were not limited to class in the strict sense of an economic relation of production and that could not be simply conjured away by an appeal to modernity over tradition. What was at stake politically for Gramsci was the so-called Southern question: the possible hegemony of communism in a country in which large sectors of the population were peasants and/or agricultural workers under semifeudal conditions.

How much of the radical potential Hardt and Negri attribute to the multitude is a resistance to coming under formal or real subsumption in capitalist relations of production: that is, to becoming proletarianized in the first place. Isn’t the distance or incommensurability between the proletariat as a category and the “multitude” a difference marked precisely by, or as, “identity”? But Hardt and Negri explicitly reject identity politics in Empire, seeing it as complicit with globalization in some ways. They appear to be saying instead that the generalized abstraction of human labor and affect produced by globalization is the precondition for the appearance of the “multitude.” In this way, their argument, though it appears in a postmodernist guise, is essentially similar to that of Second International Marxism and the Mensheviks (to be even more specific, it resembles closely Karl Kautsky’s idea of “super-imperialism” at the time of the First World War): to be against capitalism, one must first have to be transformed by it. There can be no resistance to becoming proletarianized, only resistance from the position of being always already subject to capital. But this is in effect to subordinate the struggle against capital to the time of capital (first capitalism, then socialism). Hardt and Negri remain trapped within an essentially historicist, and thus also economistic, conception that equates socialism with modernity.

On the other hand, if what the multitude resists is, to use Hardt and Negri’s own term, the “interchangeability” that results from the generalized commodification of human life and nature, then what it—the multitude—affirms are necessarily forms of cultural and psychic difference, time, need, territoriality, and desire that are at odds with the present form of capitalism. It would follow then that the opposition to capitalism at local and national as well as global levels has to be, in some measure, a struggle against or to radically modify the specific form of modernity that capitalism has created and bequeathed to the versions of socialism and communism that sought to replace it in the twentieth century: that is, “development.” If this is so, then issues of cultural “difference” and “identity” move from the status of what was called in classical Marxism “secondary contradictions” to become the or at least a primary contradiction in the contemporary world.

Let me illustrate what I have in mind here by citing two cases, both drawn from the experience of Central America in its period of revolutionary upsurge in the 1980s. The first has to do with the role of indigenous communities in the armed struggle in Guatemala. This is a very complex and much debated issue; I only wish to make one point about it that I think will be shared by most observers. The dominant forms of Marxism in Latin America from the Russian Revolution well into the 1960s, including Guatemalan socialism and communism, supposed that what was called the “Indian question” would be solved through the proletarianization and acculturation of indigenous peoples, which would take place in the context of industrialization and cultural modernization. The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui had already argued against this conception in the 1920s, noting, like Marx in his late writings on the Russian agrarian commune called the mir, that the bases for socialist forms of property and economic organization in Latin American agriculture could also be found in both pre-Colombian and contemporary features of indigenous communities, like the ayllu system in the Andes.

It could be argued that both Marx and Mariátegui had somewhat idealized views of communal pre-capitalist agrarian societies. But a contemporary text of indigenous peasant resistance such as I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984), which is narrated in class terms from the perspective of poor and middle (and partially proletarianized) peasants, obliges us to recognize that the participation of peasants generally and indigenous peasants in particular in the armed struggle in Guatemala in its period of greatest intensity in the late 1970s and early 1980s was directed in part against, or to radically limit, their dispossession, proletarianization, and forced acculturation by what amounts to a contemporary version of the primitive accumulation of capital. The armed struggle in Guatemala, which brought into alliance elements of the Marxist Left, the ladino working class, and Ladino and indigenous peasants and agricultural workers alike, required an affirmation of indigenous languages, identity, values, and traditions that is very much evident in Menchú’s narrative—especially crucial in this regard is her defense of communal forms of land tenure, as opposed to the private property forms that state-controlled land reform projects tried to impose. In other words, Guatemalan indigenous peasants were not fighting against a dictatorial state and a genocidal army in order to become more proletarianized than they already were. They were struggling to limit their subjection to capitalist modernization of agriculture and forced acculturation.

My second case has to do with a contradiction generated by Sandinista land reform policy that contributed in no small measure to the Frente Sandinista’s loss of hegemony in 1990. As the revolution moved into agriculture, Sandinista policies of land distribution and agricultural modernization began to encounter resistance, not only from the dispossessed big landowners or rich peasants, whose holdings were tolerated but not encouraged, but also from the very social class that the revolution had drawn on for support in the insurrectionary stage: the rural poor (many of the recruits to the Contra were poor or landless peasants). María Josefina Saldaña has explained this paradox as follows:

[The] FSLN identified the itinerant proletariat and minifundista formations with preproletariat or precollective consciousness, and interpreted their desires for land as petit bourgeois aspirations toward private property. . . . The FSLN’s development model intervened in every aspect of [these groups] lives without ever granting these sectors of the peasantry the political means for negotiating the terms of the intervention. . . . Consequently, the dispossessed and land-poor peasants had no way of lobbying the Sandinistas from the inside. Of course, this oversight was symptomatic of the party’s fundamental disbelief in the consciousness of these two sectors as viable or rational forms of revolutionary consciousness. (Saldaña 1997, 164, 166)

Saldaña argues that the Sandinistas should instead have negotiated “between their own progressive, vanguard nationalist vision [of modernization of agriculture] and the peasants’ ‘conservative,’ but not necessarily anti-revolutionary demands” (Saldaña 1997, 166). But this would have required an openness to the world view of poor peasants that contradicted the FSLN’s own efforts to legitimize itself ideologically, partly through an appeal to dependency theory, as a vanguard party representing the force of historical progress against underdevelopment and a reactionary past. Carlos Vilas (1989) argued that a similar problem appeared in the Sandinistas’ relations with the peoples—several different indigenous groups and the Afro-Caribbean (and mainly English-speaking) population—of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. But here, by contrast with what happened in agrarian policy, the Sandinistas were able to break away to some extent from a vanguardist, desarrollista, and “transcultured” (but dominantly Hispanic-mestizo) ethos to allow for and eventually facilitate the development of forms of linguistic, cultural, economic, and legal autonomy on the coast. The consequence? A majority of the population of the coast, which was a hotbed of opposition to the Sandinistas in the early 1980s (so much so that it was put under military occupation for a time), sensing, correctly, that the neoliberal model promised by the opposition would be a threat to the autonomy system the Sandinistas finally agreed to, voted for the FSLN in the 1990 elections at a moment when the Frente was being deserted by many of its former adherents.

Both of these cases involve a “cultural” determination that might well have been seen by classical dependency theory and the left-wing political vanguards inspired by it like the Sandinistas as part of the legacy of “underdevelopment.” Both, however, also show that the underlying contradiction in class or ethnic terms was not a lack of but rather a surfeit of modernity. The problem is not so much that dependency theory subordinated the question of culture to a purely economic logic of structural dependency and uneven exchange, as Ernesto Laclau argued in a famous polemic with Gunder Frank (Laclau 1972). The opposition between Althusserian Marxism and dependency theory was perhaps exaggerated by the proponents of both. Already in the seventies, the perspective that in a given social formation cultural or political issues might function as a “structure in dominance”—to recall the Althusserian term—had been incorporated into dependency and world systems theory in the proposition that in peripheral societies, whose economies were disproportionately subject to the external market, the relations of production and the level of development of the forces of production were themselves secured and reproduced in part by political and “cultural” practices. Social control, including control of labor and prices, was recognized as at least in part an extra-economic matter, precisely because and not in spite of dependency (in a mature capitalist state, where everything including labor is more or less subject to a generalized commodities market, the economy functions “by itself,” so to speak). At the same time, dependency theory was very quickly absorbed into Latin American literary and cultural theory, becoming something like a paradigm for the emerging fields of postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies.

So the question is not whether culture “counted” for dependency theory, but rather in what way (and what kind of culture). The cultural correlative, so to speak, of economic “delinking” in dependency theory was the idea of transculturation, first proposed by the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortíz in 1940 as an alternative to what he saw as the colonial implications of the idea of acculturation and then revised, very much in the light of the infiltration of dependency theory into literary and cultural studies noted above, by the influential Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama in the 1960s (Rama 1982). Where in processes of acculturation a subordinate culture has to yield to a dominant one, Ortiz argued that in transculturation elements of both cultures come into a dynamic relation of both conflict and combination.

Transculturation expressed in that way the possibility that the diverse cultural and linguistic forms involved in Latin America would, in their process of interaction, come together in a new, “national” synthesis, including both European and non-Western indigenous, African, and Asian elements. One should distinguish here between an anthropological account of transculturation as a process of cultural creolization that actually takes place in all multicultural societies and transculturation as a specific cultural program or goal related to “development” and the achievement of a Latin American form of modernity. Like dependency theory, this second, programmatic sense of transculturation stressed the “underdeveloped” character of the Latin American national cultures—seen as bound up with the persistence of colonial and neocolonial forms of dependency and therefore of residual Eurocentrism. In response, the intellectual, artistic, and political elites would have a “vanguard” role in creating a more inclusive, dynamic, and representative national culture. (One of the models Rama suggested for transculturation was the novel of the Latin American Boom: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and so on).

The goal of transculturation was to produce the idea of a Latin American modernity that was not simply based on the equation of modernity and forced acculturation to a European model. Transculturation would function to produce a different, more representative state, but it would also be a policy generated where possible, as in the case of the Cuba, from the state and its ideological institutions (the public education system, state-run media, museums, libraries, the canon of national literatures, and so on). But to pose the problem of the indigenous, the Afro-Latino, the regional, the anachronistic, the peasant, the urban lumpen proletariat, sexual minorities, and women as a matter of their integration into (and by) an essentially monolingual and state-centered project of economic and cultural modernization did not always open up a conceptual space to understand these classes and groups as entities in their own right, with their own “identities,” demands, values, practices, and historical narratives. The problem of ungovernability I alluded to earlier returns to haunt the progressive movements that sought to mobilize the oppressed.

Should we conclude from the apparent failure of state socialism, at least in the forms it took in the twentieth century, that civil society rather than the state is the place where the demands of the popular sectors and minorities could be expressed? That was the question posed by the emerging field of Latin American cultural studies. As I noted, Latin American cultural studies owes it origins to dependency theory, but...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Latin America in Bad Times
• 1. Dependency Theory and the Aporias of Latin American Modernity
• 2. Before the Nation: Creole Imposture or Creole Interregnum?
• 3. Caliban after Communism: Thoughts on the Future of Cuba
• 4. Torture, the Waning of the American Empire, and the “Spanish Path”
• 5. Literature, Difference, and Equality: On an Episode in Don Quijote
• 6. Postcolonial Orientalism and Literature as Such
• 7. Can Criticism Be a Militant Practice? On Testimonio and Cartonera Literature
• 8. Subaltern Lives: On “La Parte de los Crímenes” in 2666, the Story of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, Two Films by Victor Gaviria, Fernando Mereilles’s City of God, and Lurgio Gavilán’s Memorias de un soldado desconocido
• 9. The Failure of Latin America
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index