Sara C. Motta

Notes Towards Prefigurative Epistemologies

In a rundown community centre in La Independencia neighbourhood of La Vega shanty town, Caracas, in August 2006, members of Comites de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees, CTUs) came together to develop an analysis of their experiences of participating in the CTU and the successes and barriers they had encountered in their strategy to ‘democratize the city’1. The meeting lasted for two consecutive weekends during which the 20 or so participants began by discussing their history of involvement in the CTUs. These histories were written up and displayed around the room. Facilitators then began discussions orientated towards identifying the major themes that united participants’ experiences in order to develop a strategic orientation and understanding of the CTU project in La Vega. This would also form the basis of a document to be taken by elected participants to a regional level meeting to be held a number of months afterward. The key themes that came out of that meeting were the relationship of the CTUs of La Vega with the Oficina Tecnica Nacional para la Regularizacion de la Tenencia de Tierra Urbana (National Technical Office for the Legalization of Urban Land Ownership, OTN) – the state institution to which the CTUs are attached, especially around the question of the granting of funds to the Campamiento Pionero project of La Vega, the tensions that arise in light of the different demands and logics of CTU members working in the community and those working in the state, the problems in moving from the gaining of individual land title towards democratic control over land and services, and the problems of maintaining community participation in CTU projects

“We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” The Feminization of Resistance in Venezuela

An autonomist Marxist feminist analysis of the narratives of three women participants in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution—women linked by their participation in the urban land committees of La Vega, a Caracas shantytown—stresses the fundamental significance of women’s struggles in this revolutionary process. By focusing on the realities of women in movement we can begin to grasp the complexity of the feminized political subjectivities being formed and the contradictions and tensions in this process. This reading seeks to rewrite, in solidarity with women in movement, the dominant patriarchal script of politics by placing their agency and rationality at the center of Venezuela’s revolution. There is an urgent need to recognize a feminization of resistance that is historically distinctive and challenges masculinist conceptualizations of political and social transformation. Un análisis marxista feminista autonomista de los relatos de tres mujeres que participaron en la Revolución Bolivariana de Venezuela—las mujeres unidas por su participación en los comités de tierras urbanas de La Vega, un rancho de Caracas—destaca la importancia fundamental de las luchas de las mujeres en este proceso revolucionario. Al centrarse en las realidades de las mujeres en movimiento, podemos empezar a comprender la complejidad de las subjetividades políticas feminizadas que se están formando y las contradicciones y tensiones en este proceso. Esta lectura pretende reescribir, en solidaridad con las mujeres en el movimiento, el texto patriarcal dominante de la política mediante la colocación de su agencia y racionalidad en el centro de la revolución de Venezuela. Hay una necesidad urgente de reconocer una feminización de la resistencia que es históricamente distintivo y desafía conceptualizaciones masculinistas de transformación política y social.

Populism’s Achilles’ Heel: Popular Democracy beyond the Liberal State and the Market Economy in Venezuela

Minimalist definitions of populism, which are dominant in “Western” analysis, conceptualize Chavismo as a form of illiberal populism A methodological, theoretical, and empirical critique of the applicability of the term “populism” to contemporary Venezuelan politics, focused on the lived experiences of the popular classes in communal councils and urban land committees, reveals that its use masks an innovative and contradictory political process aimed at creating popular democratic subjects and a popular democracy beyond the liberal state and the market economy.

The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum

The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has reignited debate in Latin America and internationally on the questions of socialism and revolution. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different revolutionary traditions and introduces their reflections on class-struggle, the state, imperialism, counter-power, revolutionary parties, community and communes, workplaces, economy, politics, society, culture, race, gender, and the hopes, contradictions, and prospects of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’ in contemporary Venezuela.

Reinventing the lefts in Latin America: critical perspectives from below

The Venezuelan popular educator and activist Joel Linares tells us, in Pablo Navarrete’s 2009 film Inside the Revolution, that “one morning in Guarenas, behind the mountains [on the outskirts of Caracas], at 5 a.m. on February 27, 1989, a woman tried to get on the bus. When she refused to pay the new bus fare, the driver pushed her. When the driver pushed her, that was the beginning of everything. . . . The other passengers . . . got up from their seats and attacked the bus with sticks and then turned it upside down and burned it.” The popular uprising known as the Caracazo that emerged from this event turned isolated acts of resistance into mass rebellion and challenged “normal” politics. Those who had been silenced by the elite pact of developmentalism and its descent into neoliberalism began to speak as political subjects. The Caracazo marked the beginning of a new era of popular struggle in Venezuela and, arguably, across Latin America. As Mendieta (2008: xii) argues, the ideological prophets and political architects of neoliberalism sought to create an age of “the abolition of politics.” This “antipolitics” was primarily an effort to disarticulate, delegitimize, and criminalize popular-class political horizons and imaginaries, projects, subjectivities, moral economies,1 and ways of life. The embodied and visceral rupture of the Caracazo signaled the emergence of cracks in neoliberal elites’ ability to speak for Latin America’s popular classes. The fault lines in this project of antipolitics deepened in the following decade and eventually resulted in the election to power of various governments falling under the broad rubric of the “pink tide,” including those of Luiz Ignacio (Lula) da Silva of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the development of social-movement and community struggles—the recovered-factories movement in Argentina, the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement—MST) in Brazil, the water movements in Uruguay, the indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, the urban land committees in Venezuela, 489665LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13489665LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESMotta 2013

Social Movements and/in the Postcolonial: Dispossession, Development and Resistance in the Global South

A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of dignity, the lie about the defeat of humanity. The mirror of power offers us equilibrium in the balance scale: the lie about the victory of cynicism, the lie about the victory of servitude, the lie about the victory of neoliberalism.

Re-articulating Dissent: Representing the Working Class from Third Way to New Right in Britain and Chile

This article takes the 2010 electoral defeats of the Chilean Concertación and British New Labour governments as a point of departure to analyse the crisis of representation in Third Way politics and how this crisis has allowed the right to articulate a successful project of subaltern dissent. The article develops a critical reading of Gramsci through an engagement with Spivak to analyse the complex and contested relations of representation through which subaltern subjectivities are constituted politically. In applying this critical deconstruction to Britain and Chile we discuss the ways in which the Third Way discursively, materially and institutionally acted to re-present a demobilised working-class subject as part of a model of a consensual (elite-led) and de-antagonised politics. We argue that this depoliticisation and demobilisation of popular activity has served to disembed Third Way parties from their core constituencies in civil society, allowing room for the political right to re-articulate subaltern dissent. We thus analyse how the right has sought to articulate subaltern good sense in terms of (1) nostalgia, (2) anti-politics and (3) disciplinality. We conclude by suggesting some of the potential tensions and contradictions involved in this re-articulation of dissent, particularly in the re-emergence of popular mobilisation in both the UK and Chile.

Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism in Latin America

1. Militarised Neoliberalism in Colombia: Disarticulating Dissent and Articulating Consent to Neoliberal Epistemologies, Pedagogies and Ways of Life 2. Brazil and the PT as the popular face of neoliberalism: A contradictory terrain for education and the politics of knowledge 3. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: Education and 21st Century Socialism 4.The Alternative School of Community Organisation and Communicational Development, Barrio Pueblo Nuevo, Merida 5.Epistemological Counter-Hegemonies from Below: Radical Educators in/and the MST and Solidarity Economy Movements 6. Decolonisation in Praxis: Critical Educators, Student Movements and Feminist Pedagogies in Colombia 7.Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education

Reoccupying the political: transforming political science

The papers gathered in this collection emerged from a symposium concerned with the question of the political as subject, practice and epistemology. In part, the symposium evolved from a recognition of the political struggles across the globe that are reoccupying the political. Examples of these re-occupations include (but are not restricted to) Occupy in the USA, los Indignados in Spain and the Movimento sem Terra in Brazil (Landless Workers Movement, MST). Occupations of rural and urban space are creating new forms of politics and political practices involving new temporalities and counter-spatialities that are typically characterised by commitments to dialogue, mutuality and autogestion. Multidimensional in character these movements encompass geographical, temporal and embodied processes that eschew accepted institutional pathways. They challenge the idea that democracy must be organised and managed by political and intellectual elites with civil society politics confined to a politics of (and on) demand. They share a palpable desire for a politics in which people have control over decisions and processes affecting their lives. But just as importantly, these reoccupations of the political pointed to a second set of issues, namely how political science, as a global discipline often embedded within representational understandings of the political, produces both itself and its knowledge of the world. Hence an equally important consideration for those participating in the symposium was the exploration of implications of the multidimensional global reoccupation of the political for the methodological, conceptual and epistemological practices of political science as currently constituted; the nature of disciplinarity itself. The symposium thus provided an opportunity for scholars committed to critical engagement with such post-representational reoccupations of the political to prefigure a dialogical and open space of intellectual sharing, reflection and knowledge creation across difference. There has been a plethora of new forms of democratic politics and practices present in both the Global South and Global North. These innovative forms of popular democratisation often escape the confines of liberal representative understandings of the political common to mainstream political science. Rather, we encounter an explicit focus on the development of place-based horizontal forms of institutionality and democratic life in which communities make local decisions about matters of collective importance such as housing, health, urban development and education. Emerging attempts to conceptualise these popular democratising experiences have developed a number of frameworks including prefigurative, autonomous, post-representational, indigenous, decolonial and horizontal politics (Sitrin, 2006 (Horizontalism); Karatzogianni & Robinson, 2009 (autonomous); Lugones, 2010 (decolonial); Motta, 2011 (prefigurative)). Such accounts often question

Latin America as political science’s other

ABSTRACT This article develops a decolonising critique of contemporary Latin American focused Political Science (LAPS) demonstrating the complicity of its politics of knowledge in the reproduction of the logic and rationalities of coloniality. These logics and rationalities are premised upon the dehumanisation of the raced and gendered other who is denied rationality, agency and political subjectivity. I demonstrate the monological and dehumanising epistemological consequences of this through deconstruction of the foundational myths and disciplinary boundaries of the discipline; the legitimate subject of the political; and the knowing-subject of political analysis that foreground contemporary LAPS. I end with a question and a challenge: how might we learn to create a political science otherwise?