Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... Lost in Translation: The Revolution Against “The Southern Question” Jeremy Lester The evening puts out its first edition of swallows Announcing the new politics of the hour, Scarcity of light’s wheatears, A fleet of ships sails from the shipyard of the sky, The department store of shadows in the west, The mutinies and disorders of the wind, The birds moving to new addresses, The time when the evening stars will appear. The sudden death of things Drowned in the tide of nightfall, The weak cries for help from the stars From their prison of distance and infinity, The incessant marching of dream armies Against the insurrection of ghosts, And, at the points of light’s row of bayonets, The new order imposed upon the world by dawn. Jorge Carrera Andrade The beauty (and utility) of a metaphor is that you can use it in one time and context, put it safely away in a drawer (of the mind), and then bring it out again in a completely different time and context, confident that it will still have pretty much the same relevance and impact the second (third, fourth… hundredth) time that it is used; if one is lucky. And this is precisely the case in this instance. Commentators, analysts, journalists, politicians have all been rummaging through their metaphorical drawers of late in order to re-locate one in particular. If we are honest, once we have found it, we realise that it has become a bit frayed at the edges over the course of time, but what the heck, haven’t we all. And the metaphor in question? It is of course those irrepressible winds of change. Yes, they are still there, they haven’t gone away, and once again they are being put to good use, creating ‘mutinies and disorders’ not a stone’s throw away from the heart of the dreaded “Empire”. Call it what you will – excessive romanticism for distant, exotic places where good and evil, Left and Right, right and wrong, seem to stand in much sharper relief – but for those of us who have the misfortune to watch and to suffer the daily agonies and claustrophobia of political life right at the very core of the Empire, the past few years in Latin America have indeed been like a breath of fresh air. True, in some cases the winds haven’t penetrated much at all. In some other cases the perfume in the air is not quite as aromatic as some 1 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... of us might wish. And in other cases still, the original freshness of the air has started to turn just a little stale, due largely to the fact that the initial southerly direction of the winds has been replaced by a more northerly direction. But at least in some locations (Venezuela, Bolivia and, with luck, Ecuador), not only are the prevailing winds full of the sweet aromas of radical change, if you listen carefully and closely they also contain music and voices that are melodious to the ears. It is these latter winds that I mostly want to concentrate on, for they are not ordinary winds of course. Indeed, they are anything but. They are winds of life, full of heartrending hisses that rip through the poor streets of towns and villages. They are winds bearing (non-genetically modified) seeds – of liberation, social justice and human dignity – which germinate the earth wherever they are deposited. They are Aeolian winds; the kind that the young Karl Marx was so enraptured by that he himself often used them as a metaphor for revolutionary change and even wrote a brief poem that was partly in honour of them. Just a few years into the twenty-first century we have entered a new revolutionary epoch; a new period of intense, dizzying political change and of outright class conflict. Yes, I know that these words sound strange on our western civilised (oh, how civilised!) tongues. For us they have become foreign, strange words; unbelievable, incomprehensible, expropriated words; alien to our ears, alienated from our minds and hearts. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of all those thousands – tens of thousands – of ordinary, down-to-earth (I refuse to say ‘simple’) people across the length and breadth of Latin America who have planted the seeds borne on this wind and who are beginning, in some places at least – however slowly, however hesitantly – to reap some of their promised, richly deserved, harvest. Perhaps, I hear some of you think, the words are mistakenly pronounced on their tongues, even inappropriate. That is for you to decide, though I am tempted to say that that is their political privilege and our dull academic problem. This paper is therefore a (small) tribute to the huge initiative and creativity of the people who have hurled caution to the wind, who have had the courage to pronounce the “R” word again (in conjunction with the “S” word), and who have begun to transform the world around them; just as it is a tribute to those who continue the revolutionary counter-hegemonic struggle elsewhere in Latin America. * * * Let us start by going on a voyage. Our destination is the land of the Mayas; to be precise, Dzibilnocac, one of the most ancient sites of Mayan civilisation. The terrain that we need to traverse is a little like a Max Ernst paysage, mixed with the night sounds of Silvestre Revueltas, charged with the spark of a history unknown. It is a terrain full of glyphs (sculptured symbols and characters) that have suddenly become rejuvenated, given fresh life, and that therefore have to be interpreted and comprehended. The purpose of our visit is to have a different conception of the world; to engage in a dialogue with the stars; above all to re-locate the revolutionary paths of their forefathers and ancestors. It is not a voyage of 2 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... nostalgia though. It is a voyage of memory rehabilitation. It is a voyage of understanding the contemporary hegemonic struggle. Dzibilnocac is not so much a place as Time itself. It is where nothing is created, but nothing is lost. It is where actuality is constant; where the past has a permanent presence in the present. It is where physis and logos meet and unite. Accompanying us on our voyage are all kinds of interesting people, but for the most part we are in the company of Surrealists. Our guide, and main interpreter of [1] the glyphs, is Armand Gatti. For those of you who don’t know Gatti, it is worth a brief detour to tell you something about him. Armand Gatti is a Frenchman, born in Monaco in 1924, son of a Piedmontese anarchist and a cleaning woman. In his youth he attended a religious secondary school, but at the age of eighteen he joined the Maquis (the French Resistance). He was captured, imprisoned for a time in the Linderman concentration camp just outside of Hamburg (a place, he says, he has never really left), but was eventually pardoned and deported. He escaped, became a parachutist, and after the war worked as a roving reporter for a whole series of newspapers and magazines. In 1954, after receiving the Albert Londres prize, Gatti went to Central America to report on events taking place at the time. His first port of call was Guatemala, and not very long after he arrived, he found himself caught up in the US organised coup-d’étât against the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz. The violence and repression on the part of the new regime was massive and highly organised. Refusing to stay on the sidelines as nothing more than a witness to the brutality, Gatti chose sides and joined up with the ‘Mayan Maquis’ which was leading the [2] resistance, not as a combatant of arms but as a combatant of words. He became a guerrilla whose weapons were words, and in his own words he has remained an urban guerrilla ever since, using the power of language now as a writer, dramatist, film director and poet. His works have been published, performed and shown all over the world, but his preferred locations, his real mises-en-scènes, have always been in the deranged habitués of factories, prisons and the banlieues of Paris, with his current artistic residence being the “Maison de l’Arbre” in Saint-Denis by the Seine. The world for Gatti, then, has become a world of language. To situate himself in this world he equates himself with a comma; not a mechanical comma, but a comma that tries to create harmony with the underlying sense and real meaning of words. The only problem is that in the world in which we live this has become nigh-on impossible. For the most part, our words are fragmented and are separated one from the other by dictatorial full stops which are not interested, let alone capable, of forging links between words. His main task, then, is to try to create these links anew and to honour and to fulfil that surrealist desire to see ‘words make love’. So much, then, for our guide. Let us return to the voyage which he is taking us on. It is a voyage set in the vast landscape of space, sound, and time; an expanse of more than five thousand years of Mayan history. There are no maps to guide us; they simply would not be of any use. Although if we did have a map, it would be like that infamous surrealist map of the world in which it is the cultural 3 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... representations that determine the terrain and the landmarks. Likewise, although we will encounter people along the way, they are not individuals who we meet so much as collective embodiments of groups, each one representing a different aspect of the dialectical existence of the indigenous population which has pitted endless tragedy against endless acts of courageous resistance. It is, of course, a voyage of the mind, of language, and of imagination. And perhaps more than anything else it is a voyage of colour. Colours signify the existence of the population, and each colour has multiple meanings attached to them. We are introduced to all of the cardinal colours, but it is only when the colour red is encountered that we hear an immediate, spontaneous, explosive, outcry of uniform symbolic meaning. Red is for passion. Red is for revolution. Red is for Communism. Red is for… Antonio Gramsci. And in choral harmony our hosts unite in song: Avanti o popolo, alla riscossa, Bandiera rossa, Bandiera rossa Avanti o popolo, alla riscossa, Bandiera rossa trionferà. Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Evviva il communismo e la libertà Degli sfruttati l’immensa schiera La pura innalzi, rossa bandiera. O proletari, alla riscossa Bandiera rossa trionferà. Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Il frutto del lavoro a chi lavora andrà. Dai campi al mare, alla miniera, All’officina, chi soffre e spera, Sia pronto, è l’ora della riscossa. Bandiera rossa trionferà. Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Soltanto il comunismo è vera libertà. Non più nemici, non più frontiere: Sono i confini rosse bandiere. O comunisti, alla riscossa, Bandiera rossa trionferà. 4 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Bandiera rossa la trionferà Evviva Lenin, la pace e la libertà. That the name of Antonio Gramsci should have such an honoured place in this kind of context and setting should come as no surprise to anyone. Gatti has not chosen the symbolic celebration of Gramsci at random. Or, if there is a sense of chance at work here, it is that fascinating surrealist conception of objective chance. From his own personal point of view, Gatti’s choice of Gramsci has been well documented. Indeed, it has almost become an element of folklore in its own right. When I left to join the Maquis on the plains of Mille Vaches in the Massif Central [a surrealist name if ever there was one], I took with me a Garibaldi shirt (the discrete redness of which I had to conceal of course) and a handful of books: Rimbaud (when one is young, this never fails you), I Fioretti of Saint Francis of Assisi (which my mother insisted I took along), my master at that time, Henri Michaux, the taoist Zhuangzi, the Danish physician Niels Bohr, and Antonio Gramsci… Of all these ‘friends’ it was Gramsci who came to influence Gatti the most. ‘Gramsci… was my pillar of strength during the years of the Resistance. Most of [3] my time with the Maquis was spent reading Gramsci under the trees.’ And remember, this was 1942! As for the broader reasons behind the depiction of the indigenous Indian celebration of Gramsci, this too is not hard to fathom. Gatti himself has contended that from a personal point of view he has rediscovered a strange combination of Gramsci and Francis of Assisi in the (now iconic) figure of Subcomandante Marcos; one who puts cultural life and existence above economic fact. This is somewhat debatable, but we can let that pass. What we can say with almost absolute certainty and unanimity, though, is that of all Western Marxists, Gramsci undoubtedly remains the one who is most honoured and admired on Latin American soil, and his continuing influence most certainly can be felt in many different places and in many different settings. Why? Partly, I think, it has a lot to do with the fact that Gramsci is both consciously portrayed as well as explicitly used throughout Latin America as ‘the conscience of the Left’. Of course, whether this is right or wrong, let alone a good or a bad thing, is a different matter altogether. One feels reasonably sure that he himself would vehemently dislike this all too moral kind of portrayal of himself and his legacy. But partly – and here is the stronger positive sense of his continued influence – many of his ideas and his general reflections do still address at least some of the broad issues at work in the contemporary world, be it in Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else for that matter. In Latin America itself, based on discussions with activists and intellectuals, as well 5 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... as on numerous published testimonies, a number of factors repeatedly come to light here. There is considerable appreciation, for example, of Gramsci’s fundamental opposition to any form of fatalism. Whatever else one can say about Gramsci, there is nothing rigid, dogmatic, mechanical or excessively ‘deterministic’ about his ideas or his use and application of those ideas. His is an open dialectic. It is in this latter element that one can also see another dominant attribute of his continuing influence; namely, his fusion of ideas and practice, his bringing together of history and philosophy, in short, his overriding commitment to the necessity of praxis. This as well brings us on to another issue; one that was long ago recognised by Régis Debray in those (far off) days when he was an aide and adjutant to revolutionary movements across the length and breadth of Latin America. What Debray particularly appreciated about Gramsci, and more importantly what he thought was particularly appreciated by his fellow revolutionaries on the ground, was ‘Gramsci’s meticulous attention to the historical reality of the nation, [which was always] inseparable from the theoretical moment. Marxism must be born of a historical implantation, must continue a tradition – and this in its incarnated form. Thus it must “translate” the concreteness of life into theoretical form… Translate common sense into philosophy and incorporate (Marxist) philosophy into common sense: These are the two key precepts. [It is the] question of the transition from one to the other, understood at [4] once as translation and transformation.’ Debray likewise gives us another important insight as to why Gramsci has always been popular in Latin America. It is the manner in which both his writings and his actions ‘bear witness’, can be seen as ‘milestones of a historical hope’. More particularly, it is the way in which the transition of theory into practice aspired to produce nothing less than a new civilisation, a new culture, a new way of life, and perhaps most important of all, ‘a scale of values radically different from those prevalent under Western capitalism – [5] which has become inorganic, decadent, dualist.’ The unity of theory and practice; making theory the agent of the transition into history as well as the transformation of history; welding together the objective demands of any historical moment into the spontaneous feelings of the masses. These, of course, are not just abstract points of philosophical principle. They are also concrete questions of direct political strategy, and no one should underestimate the strategic significance of Gramsci’s own concerns, and no one should certainly underestimate or downplay the practical strategic influence that Gramsci currently has on political movements and forces throughout Latin America. This is not a question of how many times a political leader might nominate Gramsci in his speeches, interviews, and conversations as being some kind of source of inspiration. This is an easy game to play but ultimately very superficial: Gramsci 2, Trotsky 1. Marx 3, Lenin 0. It starts to read like a set of sports results. No, it is much, much more than that. It is about ways in which a political leader’s day-to-day outlook, his or her way of looking at the world around them, their way of formulating tasks to be carried out and how these tasks might be fulfilled, are all soaked through to the core with a broad Gramscian perspective; often subconsciously, often without knowing or fully recognising it. And if one is looking for concrete illustrations of this Gramscian penetration of the mind and its way of viewing the world, I would point to two cases in particular. The first is 6 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. In Chávez’s case the Gramscian influence is certainly acknowledged, and repeatedly so in more recent times as his programme of reforms has so evidently become more and more radicalised. And in this conscious recognition of Gramsci’s influence, one element above all is usually singled out for primacy – the overwhelming need for ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. But as already stressed, it is not just about the conscious recognition of an influence, and the more one reads his speeches and listens to his words, there can be no doubt that while the language or the dialect is decidedly influenced by political sources much closer to home, there is nevertheless a strong underlying Gramscian accent that can invariably be detected if one listens carefully. But it is in the second of our cases where I would contend that the Gramscian penetration of the general intellectual and strategic outlook of the mind has gone furthest. And the individual I am referring to is Álvaro García Linera, the Vice President of Bolivia. If you want a clear testimony of the continuing, clear-cut, practical, strategic influence of Gramsci, then I do not think that you could do better than to read the speeches and listen to the words of García. And I say this in the full recognition that Gramsci’s name is hardly, if ever, directly mentioned. In a strictly Bolivian context, García has primarily been influenced by the political theorist, René Zavaleta, one of the main pioneers of the idea of a national-popular [6] bloc comprising a heterogeneous array of subaltern subjects. While in a broader context, García tends usually to stress the influence of Pierre Bourdieu, and indeed his interpretation of Bourdieu’s ideas is often extremely creative. But notwithstanding the silence of Gramsci’s name, there is barely a sentence uttered by García that is not construed in Gramscian terms. And this applies as much to his time in opposition as it does to the period in which he has occupied the Vice Presidency. From his understanding of the nature of the state and the remit of state power, to the founding correlation of forces that give rise to any individual state regime; from his awareness of the mobilising beliefs that generate a degree of social and moral conformity among both ruling and ruled, to the state’s deliberate use of cultural and folkloric rituals and repertoire to sustain its power; from his understanding of the general symptoms that can generate a profound crisis of the state, to his specific diagnosis of how hegemonies can grow tired and exhausted; from his appreciation of how moments are produced where the state ceases to be perceived as irresistible, to his stress on the need to maximise the expression of popular dissent; from his understanding of the need to unify heterogeneous forces together into a solid class-based alliance, to his stress on the practical educational process of realising political, moral, cultural, and organisational leadership; from his acute understanding of the chasm that separates the negative act of destroying the old, and the absolutely essential need to have a ready-made positive conception of an alternative order already in place; from his stress on how historical blocs can disintegrate from within, and how new historical blocs need to be formulated; from his understanding of the moral dimension of hegemonic construction, to the intellectual requirements of a new collective will – on these, and many other matters, few have understood and assimilated some of the most essential Gramscian orientations better than Álvaro García Linera. His whole outlook is literally saturated in Gramscian perspectives. And one cannot repeat the point enough: this is not just an intellectual or theoretical interpretation of 7 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... Gramsci’s ideas; it is a direct political–strategic use of Gramsci that is second to none. Is it any wonder, therefore, that given the Gramscian influence on the likes of such prominent leaders as Chávez and García, the levels of ‘Gramsciphobia’ within the top echelons of the US administration and academia, which have always been high, are now (in some cases at least) registering concerns that are off [7] the measurable scale? In short, these are more than just ‘echoes’ of Gramsci’s influence on some of the most salient processes at work in the new revolutionary epoch that has emerged in certain parts of Latin America. It is almost as though there is a constant on-going dialogue with him. He is a permanent interlocutor. But having said all of this, we also have to clearly recognise and appreciate how this dialogue takes place and acknowledge some of the other consequences that stem from this interlocutory exchange. Gramsci’s main role in this dialogue is to be the poser of questions; good questions to be sure, the right kind of questions, the kind that both demand and stimulate (hopefully good) answers. But notwithstanding the tremendous utility and appropriateness of the questions, they can only ever be very general in nature. The answers to these questions, however, have to be extremely specific, and precisely because of their very specificity, it must be others who provide the answers. Gramsci can today provide no specific answers and no specific solutions himself, nor should we expect this from him. This would be asking too much of his legacy. In addition, if a dialogue is to be genuine, even one based on a primarily disjointed question and answer process, then inevitably there have to be moments of disagreement and differences between the respective participants in the dialogue. Last but not least, not all things in this dialogue are going to be ‘translatable’. Inevitably, some things will be lost in translation. In other words, then, having recognised and celebrated the fact that a Gramscian way of thinking about the world around us, and engaging in a head-on struggle with that world, has not been exhausted, so we must nevertheless recognise the limits, weaknesses, and deficiencies of Gramsci’s approach. After all, to honour Gramsci, to do full justice to him, is surely to engage in robust critical engagement with him. Just as much as one should not dismiss him outright as passé, so must one certainly not deify him, or utilise him artificially in areas that are simply not appropriate. It is when we come to ask the basic fundamental question, ‘who are the main social protagonists, who are the dominant historical agents, of the current revolutionary epoch in Latin America?’, that we come up against arguably the main limitation of a Gramscian approach (although of course he is not the only one who is culpable here). For whatever answer we give to this question, you can be pretty sure of one thing. With very few exceptions (perhaps most notably in Argentina), the social sector and class which will not feature prominently in the answer is the traditional urban working class. The labour movement has all but been decimated by its political and cultural defeats over the past three decades. What remains of the sector is highly dispersed and highly co-opted. Labour has effectively been ‘disincorporated’ from the old-style emancipatory projects, and as a consequence it is certainly not industrial workers who man the insurrectionary frontlines or barricades. Instead, the real protagonists are to be found elsewhere. They are to be found amongst the massed ranks of the ‘dispossessed’, the 8 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... ‘squatters’, the ‘wretched of the earth’, the ‘lumpen’. And most noticeable of all (again with Argentina as the key exception), they are to be found amongst the peasants, the campesinos, and the agricultural workers (trabajadores agricolas), both with and without the ‘indigenous’ label attached to them. This is without doubt the key innovatory factor at work here. And it is so innovatory that we simply cannot rely, or refer back to, a Gramscian framework here to explain this phenomenon. Gramsci had many positive things to say about so-called ‘subaltern’ forces, but when it came to the peasants he was as generally dismissive and sceptical about their revolutionary hegemonic potential as most other classical Marxists were at this time. True, he never went quite so far as to dismiss them as a reactionary ‘sack of potatoes’ trying to roll back the wheel of history. But he did repeatedly draw attention to them as a pre-modern, uncoordinated, amorphous mass who were totally incapable of giving any meaningful expression to their real aspirations and needs. He lamented their shortsightedness, their revelling in their ills and misery, and their susceptibility to the most simplistic articulations of the bourgeois state apparatus. And he had few qualms at all about portraying them as ‘enslaved to the banks and the parasitic industrialism of the North’, and of being no more capable of reacting to their desperate plight than by acts of brigandage. In short, Gramsci concluded, the peasant is ‘not a revolutionary’ nor is he a ‘fighter for communism’. All he can hope to become, left to his own devices, is [8] ‘an assassin of the “rich”.’ And it is for all these reasons of course that, incapable of representing their own interests, and unable to form a genuine class structure of their own, they must therefore succumb to the leadership, direction, and domination of the (Northern) industrial proletariat. They must be led by the hand, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the era of modernity, for it is only by this means that their emancipation will be secured. It is this depiction of the peasants, then, that simply cannot in any sense at all explain what is currently happening. Latin American campesinos today are not being led or directed by any other social force, and certainly not by the proletariat; nor do they need to be. Instead, it is they themselves who are primarily doing the ‘leading’. It is they who are firmly in the vanguard of revolutionary change. It is they who are the modernising force in real transformational ways (with no need for the ‘pre’ or ‘post’ prefix to be attached to this modernising role). It is they who are the most cosmopolitan in their intellectual outlook, creatively dynamic and ‘organic’ in their organisational and mobilising skills. It is they who best embody [9] the requirements of praxis, ‘attracting “doers” rather than ideologues.’ And it is they who have the greatest clarity of awareness and understanding of their class interests and their class consciousness; one that makes them absolutely committed combatants in a class war. Trotsky may help us here explain this phenomenon with his notions of uneven and combined development and the ‘privileges of backwardness’. Other theorists, such as Franz Fanon, can likewise help us put this into some broader perspective. As too can someone like José Carlos Mariátegui. But the only real way in which we can apply a Gramscian framework here is to do exactly what he himself had the courage to do in relation to the exceptional nature of the Russian Revolution. That is to say, recognise the exceptionality of the current situation from his own paradigm, admire it, praise it, celebrate it, and use it against the spirit of Gramsci himself. In short, I would contend, what we are 9 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57 Lost in Translation file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/a/Documenti/igs%20sardeg... witnessing is not just a new Revolution Against “Capital”; it is likewise a Revolution Against “The Southern Question” – Gramsci’s version of the “Southern Question” (admittedly of course in a highly expanded form). As has already been argued, the new vanguard forces of change in Latin America certainly do not reject the ‘invigorating, immanent thought’ of Gramsci. But by living this thought in new kinds of ways they have certainly decontaminated some of its own ‘positivist and naturalist encrustations’. This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilisation) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way men’s will [10] determines. It is perhaps the destiny of us all to have our own words used against us. In the context in which this has been done, and in light of the achievements made, one feels sure that Gramsci would not object. It is a cause for celebration that once again we can say: ‘this should not in principle be happening, yet thank goodness it is.’ What kind of general factors, then, might explain this new revolutionary role of the peasants? And what have been some of the consequences and effects on other social forces? If there is one word which most accurately describes the nature of peasant life in Latin America (or anywhere else for that matter) it is the word ‘survival’. There is nothing new in this. That is the way it has always been. It is this struggle for survival that lies at the heart and soul of their very existence. One tends automatically to think of survival as a reactive process, as a form of preservation and conservation. But in today’s Latin America it has become much more than that. Survival has become an act of transformation, not just of the peasant’s own condition of existence, but more importantly of everything external to his own existence. That is to say, survival has been dialectically linked with the desire and need for overriding systemic change – social, economic, cultural, and political. Latin American peasants have proved to be remarkably good dialecticians. Underpinning their condition of survival, the very way in which they live their lives and carry out their work, peasants have always relied heavily on strong communitarian, and indeed egalitarian, structures of organisation. They have not had to invent these structures out of nothing. They have developed organically over many decades and centuries, and the peasants have demonstrated remarkable skills in adapting and improvising traditional structures of organisation to present-day requirements and needs. Linked with this has always been a strong sense of loyalty, both to themselves as a group (a class) as well as to their cause. One also needs to recognise that they have always been essentially a class apart, with all the positive and negative connotations that are attached to this. The 10 di 20 13/07/2007 22.57