Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott / Reactionary Reformism

 

REACTIONARY REFORMISM

 

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

 
 
1. - A version popularized by analysts and the media maintains that the failure of the Chilean constituent process is due, fundamentally, to the fiery rhetoric of the members of the constitutional convention, which ended up producing a maximalist and incoherent proposal that, far from representing the balanced feeling of Chilean society, echoed the outbursts of the front line, a kind of feverish vanguard that insisted on maintaining the climate of confusion inaugurated by the revolts of 2019. Not having presented a “reasonable” constitution, not having politically calculated the balances by considering the centrist tendency of the national electoral processes (with the exception of the so-called entry plebiscite of October 25, 2020), triggered the citizen rejection of the exit plebiscite of September 4, 2022. To this more or less basic version, analyzes of various types are added, among them, those that characterize the revolts themselves as youthful outbursts and tantrums for access to the benefits of mass consumption, or those that characterize the massive and horizontal days of rebellion –which arose from the insubordination of high school students in the face of the rise in subway fares– as anomic expressions of a society in crisis, incapable of adequately processing its intense modernization processes. Indeed, analysts, political scientists, professional politicians and occasional intellectuals have brought to light the arsenal of normative concepts and technologies typical of a long tradition of thought dedicated to classifying, determining and neutralizing the threats of the masses, plebs or multitudes to the so-called exceptional Chilean democracy. What Étienne Balibar (2009) called “fear of the masses” and which constitutes the secret core of modern reactionary thought, has been present since the beginning of Chilean republican life, whether we are referring to interventions of a positivist and pacifying nature in the second half of the 19th century, or we are referencing the aristocratic and ethnocentric essayism that goes from La raza chilena by Palacios, through El roto by Joaquín Edwards Bello, to the moralizing diatribes of Lucy Oporto or Carlos Peña about the recent revolts, which coincide, and not by chance, with the warnings of transitional sociology against the days of protests that destabilized the dictatorial regime, and which were later instrumentalized by the establishment of the transition. The so-called Hobbesian or securitarian hypothesis that, among others, Roberto Esposito (2004) recently questioned again, acquires an unusual relevance in the national context insofar as it allows us to explain the foundation of the oligarchic pact of the 19th century and its continuity with the contemporary immunitary or juristocratic practices, those that limit and reduce politics to an administrative and police sphere, at the hands of a “political class” that, by the way, has no legitimacy, according to official surveys in the country.
 
2. – However, this standardized narrative is not the patrimony of the Chilean right-wing, but is shared by the political class in a transversal way, since it provides powerful arguments to justify the final relevance of political parties for politics, a politics, one should remember this here, that is subsidized by State and consequently oriented to maintain peace and order, governability and the rule of law, based on a permanent process of spoliation and neutralization of citizen demands. If, as Mario Góngora (1981) postulated, the Chilean nation was founded from the State, so it is not difficult to perceive how this foundation marked and continues to mark the limits of democracy. Whether we are referring to the oligarchic pact in which liberals and conservatives alternated during the 19th century; to the liberal-democratic pact of the 20th century, which coincided with national-developmentalism and whose last chapter was marked by the processes of nationalization of copper and the agrarian reform; or that we refer to the current neoliberal pact, inaugurated with the civic-military dictatorship and deepened in the post-dictatorial context by the administrations of both the Concertación and the right-wing, which together have re-staged the palatial make-up of the 19th century in a duopoly that “democratically” takes turns in the office. In this long-term horizon, the definition of politics and its limits was marked by the predominance of the juristocratic pact, that is, the pact that, based on the preeminence of the law and the constitution, was imposed as necessary while hiding the illegitimate nature of the law itself and of the various national constitutions, all of them elaborated behind the backs of the people (Salazar 2023). In this context, it should come as no surprise that, after the well-advertised failure of the exit plebiscite, a return to an old national custom has taken place: that of delegating the production of a new constitution to a group of experts whose legitimacy is far from unquestionable.
 
3. – Of course, this tendency to judicialize socio-political processes is not exclusive to the Chilean case, but it is here where it is expressed in an exemplary manner, given the legal ties and the electoral law itself, which perpetuates the constitutional order inherited from the dictatorship. Beyond Chile, however, the juristocratic trend responds to a process of immunitary bureaucratization that operates by neutralizing social conflicts through its technical delegation to experts or law functionaries, who, far from being guided by normative imperatives of social justice, are guided by the self-referential assumptions of the legal-administrative sphere of the State and its sovereignty (I take this notion from Hirschl 2007, though I use it in a different way). This dissociation between the requirements of institutional legality and the assumptions of social legitimacy constitutes one of the most relevant aspects of the debate on the crisis of politics, at least since the Weberian diagnosis of instrumental rationality, or since the debates between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann regarding the crisis of legitimation of the welfare state. What stands out now, however, is that the conventional democratic solution, that is, the expansion of participation and the decentralization of authority, does not seem to be enough to counteract the folding of political-administrative processes to the demands of flexible contemporary accumulation. It is precisely here where the Chilean case is symptomatic because it clearly shows the way in which neoliberal governance functions as a new type of passive revolution, a gattopardism decanted in the Chilean criollismo, which promises substantive changes, while intensifying accumulation and devastation processes that affect the population in general. In turn, the so-called universalization of the securitarian paradigm, that is, of the security agenda as global pacification, which in the post-Cold War context becomes an absolute priority (expressed in the wars against crime, terrorism or drug trafficking), in reality defines a new strategy of neoliberal governmentality, a strategy articulated by various technologies and dispositives of domination, all of them based on the reduction of the people to the condition of population and on the priority of capitalist deregulation over any criterion of redistributive social justice. These new technologies of neoliberal governmentality, which by the way are no longer the prerogatives of the State, are disseminated through social formations in varying degrees and intensities: the binding nature of the debt; the modernization of the police apparatus and its performative crisis; the reduction of cultural and value debates to the so-called lawfare or legal dispute, particularly in relation to the problem of sexual dissidence, women’s rights, migratory processes and the re-emergence of ethnic-racial diversities as a symptom of a radical crisis of the restricted notion of citizenship; the emergence of algorithmic government practices and the speculative and financial virtualization of economic processes; etc. It is in this context, therefore, that the Chilean process must be inscribed in order to understand how its institutional inertia tends towards its own reproduction (an issue that Benjamin characterized as mythical violence of law, 1998). It would be this legal self-referentiality that overdetermines contemporary reformism, revealing its profoundly reactionary character, which expresses itself by neutralizing and deactivating the antagonistic dynamics that define social movements –an issue that also explains the continuity between the various administrations in the post- Chilean dictatorship. On the other hand, however, it should be understood that this juristocratic pact is not exclusive to the Chilean process, but rather expresses a change in the nature of political and administrative practices and institutions at a global level, a mutation of sovereignty as a hermeneutic horizon in which, historically, social struggles were inscribed.
 
4. – For all this, it does not cease to amaze us that before noticing the anti-democratic character of this Creole, exceptionalist and juristocratic tradition; before looking at its functionality to the imperatives of accumulation, be it in the expansive capitalism of the 19th century, in the industrial capitalism of the 20th century, or in contemporary global and neo-extractivist capitalism; before noticing the imperatives of neoliberalism and its processes of flexible accumulation and devastation, which are expressed in a sustained precariousness of the lives of the working masses and an exponential growth of the debt as a correlate of the managerial utopia of the so-called middle class; and even before noticing the sustained processes of economic and political exploitation and spoliation that found the so-called Chilean democracy, the official and providential account of the experts on duty accused the revolts of having altered, almost irreparably, the social order, inscribing within the national coexistence an unprecedented and unforgivable violence, a violence that attempted against a long democratic tradition. The same sermon is heard everywhere, right and left: the reason for the current crisis is due both to the days of social revolts, and to the incompetence of the constituents to adjust themselves to the national civic sentiment. And this is precisely what ends up complementing the limited legal model in which the process of constitutional re-foundation is inscribed, that is, a moralistic conception of violence that is blind to its own violent precedents. Isn’t the perpetuation of the same management model implemented by the civic-military dictatorship in the context of post-dictatorial administrations radically violent? Isn’t the structural corruption of the country’s military and police institutions violent, along with the repeated cases of corruption and corporate collusion in the last 30 years? Isn’t the same distribution of income, property and wealth in the country violent? Or are we willing to assume that these things are products of a natural law and therefore beyond our reach? All this, without even mentioning the sustained embezzlement of natural resources; the equally sustained repressive violence of the police apparatus against the Mapuche population and against the Chilean population in general; the administrative negligence related to immigration and public health crisis; the scandalous fishing law as a synecdoche of a structural corruption that shows the logic of accumulation itself and the endemic concentration of wealth and property in the same families for a long time, as long as the history of the country; the monopoly of the media and its infinite vulgarization of “national events”, thanks to absolutely irrelevant morning shows and sensationalist media journalism; the business of universities and the precarization of free public education; the crisis of the health system and social security, and so on. Bertolt Brecht maintained that robbing a bank was infinitely less criminal than founding it. Isn't this the true horizon in which we should inscribe the revolts? After all, what is a revolt in the context of the permanent exploitation and spoliation of the citizenry by the agents of the neoliberal order? As a famous 19th century German essayist would say, the revolts have shown us that the Holy Alliance is always ready and willing to sanctify the status quo.
 
5. – But there is still a more decisive dimension of this juristocratic horizon. That relative to the continuity between the immunitarian operation of law and the cybernetic reduction of experience to the condition of information. Indeed, the so-called cybernetic hypothesis (Tiqqun 2015) consists of showing the transformations of sovereignty in the contemporary world, noting how technological mediation implies a general standardization of historical-cultural references and the development of a governmentality capable of producing anticipatory models and operate in preventive terms. What the humanities feared so much: the technification of language and the predominance of communicability without communication, has been accomplished in the context of cybernetic governmentality, data-mining and big data. In turn, what Bernard Stiegler (2010) identified as generalized entropy, that is, as an entropic reduction of the complexity or singularity of historical experiences and references, was already present in the criticism of the mythical violence of law (Benjamin), but now it extends to the general forms of order configuration in contemporary societies. In this sense, the critique of law is also a critique of algorithmic governmentality, because although it claims to be an objective (“post-humanist”) overcoming of the linguistic referent, it is still structured by a binary and evaluative language, which organizes the world according to self-referential criteria of relevance. In other words, the conversion of experience into information, of justice into law, of politics into administration, is nothing more than the conversion of historical contingency into an autopoietic process oriented towards its own systemic reproduction. But why is all this important? Because it allows us to understand the scope of neoliberal governmentality beyond its conventional representation, that is, it allows us to understand how the critique of law, historicism and cybernetic mediation point to the same process of obliteration of differences. It would be this process of reduction and obliteration that also shows us a radical change in the very configuration of relations of power and domination. To put it schematically, the self-referentiality of legal and administrative languages currently dispenses with hegemonic mediation and the classical theory of democratic legitimacy. The substantive change in the nature of the State and the modern political institutions precipitated by the globalization processes is now shown as a metamorphosis of sovereignty oriented towards the decentralization of its control and reproduction processes, beyond the classic public sphere, and beyond the problem of legitimation and any other modern regulatory criteria. The very configuration of this techno-tele-mediatic order implies the triumph of a facticity without historical density, in which the random and anarchic condition of contingency is converted into a neoliberal performance. Hence, then, the need to think about the anarchic and random nature of the revolts as a disarticulation of the securitarian governmentality.
 
6. – Of course, we are not advocating either a rejection of technology or an anti-parliamentary radicalism. It is not about betting on a total exodus from the State and the institutions, but on an effective historicization of the meaning of politics, democracy and participation, to better appreciate the limits of the Chilean juristocratic pact. We are advocating for a critical theory of institutions that allows us to understand them not as inseminations of a sacred divine will, but as temporary prostheses destined to promote and enhance life in common. It is not, therefore, a question of abdicating the law and its mythical and violent operations, but of enabling a new relationship with the law, “inoperative” and capable of breaking with the equivalential assumption that mobilizes it. A law not of sanctioned reciprocity or calculated equivalence, but open to the singularity of justice, which implies a material theory of institutions as technical devices at the service of life, and not as sacralized and de-historicized sovereign landmarks. It is precisely in this context that we can no longer continue to confuse the common of a historically situated existence with the public, which is nothing more than the reduction of the common to the representational operation of the modern sovereign theater.
 
7. – The modern sovereign theater is constituted by the series of State operations oriented to the production of a national, transversal and mobilized identity according to the imperatives of national-developmentalism (Williams 2022). From inclusive public policies, the expansion of the vote and basic education, the transculturating and modernizing policies, the development of Latin American populism in the mid-20th century –understood as machines that mobilize and configure the “national People”–, passing through the strategies of popular front and the expansion of the sphere of electoral competition, including the development of national and continental culture, the internationalization of art and literature, and the expansion of symbolic markets, up to the development of nuestramericanistas, anti-imperialist, and nationalist hermeneutics, a series of identification processes and operations allowed the production of a national identity that coincided with the legal-political representation of the People, on which Popular sovereignty rested, and  on which, in turn, the State sovereignty rested. That is to say, the scopic regime of this sovereign theater allowed legitimizing the operations of the Nation-State in the sovereignty of the People, but of a national People already homogenized according to the postulation of a determined fictitious identity. In other words, the legitimacy of the State, its apparatuses and its forms of government was guaranteed, in the last instance, by the sovereignty of the People, but this People (with capital letters) did not respond to the material and effective heterogeneity of the peoples, but to the construction of a fictive ethnicity inseminated from the State. The co-belonging between State sovereignty and Popular sovereignty, ultimately, allowed the organization of the political spectrum without radically calling into question the assumptions of the very theater of operations. Whether in terms of a bipolar geopolitics strongly marked by the Cold War, whether in terms of a national(ist) resistance against imperialism, or in terms of a war of positions in order to achieve hegemony, the truth is that, as in Kafka’s famous story about the Oklahoma theater, in the Latin American sovereign theater everyone was challenged. Certainly, left and right-wings co-belonged in this sovereign theater.
 
8. – It is this same sovereign theater (now in ruins) that continues to determine the progressive affection of the contemporary left, the affection that allows it to reprogram itself according to the emphases of the new international scene, occupying the place of the struggles for identity and recognition, without realizing that such struggles constitute the backbone of the democratic politics of the modern political theater –changing the notion of the Third World or periphery to that of the Global South can undoubtedly seem like a genius invention! The current combination of identity struggles and processes of intensification of extractivism –that has characterized the recent progressive governments of Latin America– allowed them to enter the new world order as suppliers for the so-called commodity consensus (Svampa 2013), but this Pyrrhic progress has revealed the structural condition of the passive revolution of global capitalism, showing at the same time that reactionary reformism constitutes a complex framework of positions in which progressivism continues to think that it “swims with the current.” If, as Simón Ramírez (2022) has pointed out, neoliberalism goes beyond the merely economic sphere, constituting a great attempt to recompose society, an issue that also demands a complex and concerted strategy for its dismantling, it is also true that even before enter into its democratic-parliamentary game, we would need to sharpen our analysis tools to better understand the ways in which its flexible and accommodative managerial operation supposes not only a turn to the right, but a radical mutation of the order and nature of politics and of democracy. Otherwise, living in the ruins of the modern sovereign theater, we can only aspire to its partial, palliative and contingent reconstruction, without the possibility of interrupting the accumulation processes and the abstraction and standardization operations of contemporary cybernetic capitalism. That is to say, without a critique of value in the context of the total subsumption of life to capital, we can only aspire to the compensatory reformism of the contemporary progressive horizon, necessary, but not sufficient.
 
9. – Of course, it is not about renouncing the tactical utility of said progressivism and clumsily betting on an extra-parliamentary position, fueled by a romantic representation of revolutionary ethics, since that ethics ended up being as sacrificial as the capitalist ethos (Echeverría, 1998), demanding partisan dedication and sacrifice, beyond the actual possibility of change. On the contrary, it is a matter of thinking the complexity of all the institutions and concepts that make up the framework of the modern sovereign theater, including notions such as popular sovereignty, people and revolution.
 
9.1. – On the one hand, the question of popular sovereignty and the people appear as natural referents on which the final legitimacy of power rests; however, in the face of this quasi-naturalistic model, a critique of the substantialization and transcendentalization of the People would have to be carried out, as if said People –in which Popular sovereignty would finally reside– were a substantive and transhistorical entelechy, a substance ontologically complete and ready to be discovered and emancipated. Against these substantialist theories it would be necessary to oppose the material heterogeneity of peoples, that is, of peoples as proliferating forms of life, beyond their subordination to the juridical notion of The People. For peoples only exists in the contingency of its demotic irruptions (Rancière 1996), in the self-organization of its historical emplacements, and not in the ballot paper or in the urban planning of contemporary social engineering. As Georges Didi-Huberman (2012) has insisted, the legally exposed People should be stressed from by the irruption of the figurative peoples, those who catachrestically alter the plane of modern legal-political representation.
 
9.2. – On the other hand, the history of the 20th century shows us that the very notion of Revolution ended up being captured by the sovereign theater, which turned it into an original, foundational and monumental event, legitimizing its own processes and deployments. That is to say, the Revolution, which began by being imagined as a radical transformation, ended up constituting the foundational and sovereign moment of the re-articulation of the modern political theater, and its corresponding monumentalization allowed the neutralization of its destituent forces, the deactivation of its critical potential, giving way to a historicist and sacrificial narrative that petrifies the past and naturalizes the present. The insurrectionary moment ended up being devoured by the rhetoric of the Revolution and, as Furio Jesi (2015) has indicated, beyond the possible convergences between revolt and revolution, the revolt does not try to accelerate the realization of a certain historical project, but to interrupt precisely this historical time, which is nothing more than the spatialized time of capital, from a radical alteration of the sovereign theater, an alteration in which the bodies resist following the pre-established script of history and become insubordinate to occupy the streets of a city that can no longer be conceived as the scene of sovereignty and its operations. In this sense, the series of contemporary revolts from the Zapatista insurrection to the Occupy Movement, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, or from the Chilean student revolts to the recent social demonstrations in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Iran, etc., reveal the end of the modern sovereign theater, the dissolution of modern distance and the classical pit, which was nothing but an effect of the scopic regime of sovereignty, staging a destituent and anarchic potency that denies the foundation –the principle or arché– and, therefore, the pre-established script of history, to manifest itself contingently on the horizon of a time that resists its full capitalistic spatialization. Contemporary revolts no longer represent previously assigned class identities, are no longer explained by geopolitical and identity partisan struggles, nor are they reduced to conventional demands for recognition: revolts have in common the fact of affirming ways of life beyond the spoliation and devastation constitutive of contemporary accumulation processes. In this sense, revolts imply a conatus of existence against the devastation of capital.
 
10. - If the revolts imply the irruption of a material heterogeneity that can no longer be redirected to the notion of identity, be it national, class or of any other type, then the revolts demand a radical questioning of the limits of the modern sovereign theater. When trying to calm this irruption from the reconfiguration of the juristocratic pact, the heterogeneity expressed by the revolts is once again reduced to an identifying and patronage logic. How then to think of an alternative to the permanent reproduction of the modern representational bond? Especially if we understand that one cannot live permanently in the revolt, that is, in the demotic irruption since, as an irruption, it implies a suspension of historical time. How to advance beyond the moment of the revolt, towards an instituting process that does not repeat the vicious circle of the mythification of the foundation? This is the horizon in which the possibility of a wild republicanism is inscribed, without arché, at odds with the logic of foundation, articulated beyond the normative determinants codified by law, open to historical contingencies and configured by a relationship of extimacy with the orderless order of events. Precisely because it is not a question of a maximalist critique of law and institutions, but of a historical and critical interrogation that allows us to enter into a different relationship with law, as a historically articulated form of imagination, and with institutions as prostheses of a common and enhanced existence beyond the misery of neoliberal democracy. These same questions arise from the Chilean case, precisely because in it the revolts disclose the radical mismatch between the institutional order of representation and the material configuration of society.
 
April 2023
 
 
 
Translated from Spanish into English by Gonzalo Díaz Letelier.
 
 
 
References
  
Balibar, Étienne (2009). “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses”. Rethinking Marxism, 2:3, 104-139.
 
Benjamin, Walter (1998). Para una crítica de la violencia y otros ensayos - Iluminaciones IV. Taurus.
 
Didi-Huberman, Georges (2012). Pueblos expuestos, pueblos figurantes. Manantial.
 
Echeverría, Bolívar (1998). La modernidad de lo barroco. Ediciones ERA.
 
Esposito, Roberto (2004). Immunitas. Protección y negación de la vida. Amorrortu.
 
Góngora, Mario (1981). Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de Estado en Chile en los siglos XIX y XX. Editores La Ciudad
 
Hirschl, Hans (2007). Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. Harvard University Press.
 
Jesi, Furio (2015). Spartakus. Simbología de la revuelta. Adriana Hidalgo Editores.
 
Ramírez, Simón (2022). El gran ensayo. Génesis social, consolidación y crisis del neoliberalismo en Chile. Tiempo Robado Editoras.
 
Rancière, Jacques (1996). El desacuerdo. Política y filosofía. Nueva Visión.
 
Salazar, Gabriel (2026). “Once veces se ha intentado en Chile dictar una Constitución para construir el Estado nacional”. Entrevista en El mostrador, 15 de abril:  https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2023/04/15/historiador-gabriel-salazar-once-veces-se-ha-intentado-en-chile-dictar-una-constitucion-para-construir-el-estado-nacional/
 
Stiegler, Bernard (2010). For a New Critique of Political Economy. Polity.
 
Svampa, Maristella (2013). “«Consenso de los Commodities» y lenguajes de valoración en América Latina”. Revista Nueva Sociedad 244, 30-46.
 
Tiqqum (2015). La hipótesis cibernética. ‎ A. Machado Libros S. A.
 
Williams, Gareth (2022). El otro Lado de lo popular. Neoliberalismo y subalternidad en America Latina. Ediciones Macul.
 

Mauricio Amar / The Negro Matapacos and the Symbols of the Revolt

 

The Negro Matapacos and the Symbols of the Revolt 

Mauricio Amar

 

There are symbols of the revolt that are imposed by power and others that are created by the people. That is an exclusive potency of the revolt, because in normal times, in the one that appears to be linear and homogeneous, neither the people are the people nor are their symbols their own. The revolt makes the people invent symbols that, of course, come from the most subterranean places of memory. Of dark labyrinths whose passages had been blocked for decades or centuries. The creation of these symbols is a fundamental part of a popular revolt, because through them the people exist in the form of the common. They are the codes of a strange telepathy that means that events are not stopped by some power’s announcement, since each message from the government is passed through the sieve of its meanings.

At least two symbols that emerged spontaneously from people are the Negro Matapacos [“Copkiller Black Dog”] and the Mapuche flag. Two symbols that with some differences mean the same thing. On the one hand, the Negro Matapacos as an enraged quiltro [mixed, mongrel, dog without defined breed], a non-submissive dog and, nevertheless, a friend of some humans, of the oppressed ones. The fact that many demonstrators use the bandana printed with the figure of the dog in protests is a clear sign that Negro Matapacos symbolizes the quiltro that we all are, the infinite mixture that makes up our bodies, without any pretense of whitening, or definitely against any type of belonging to a race, a privileged group or an originary way of life. The Negro Matapacos destroys even the search for anthropocentric human superiority and links the people with the animal, unifying soul and body in an absolute way. There are no longer some with a soul and others with a body, but only mestizos [mixed]. A form-of-life that cannot be appropriated by power.

In a beautiful book entitled Dogs [Chiens], the French philosopher Mark Alizart has shown us that the dog, a particularly unfairly reviled figure in modern times, was once the animal that bonded with us lovingly, guarded us from external dangers, and gave us the possibility of having leisure time, essential for the emergence of philosophy and the arts. The dog is submissive most of the time, but he does not hesitate to defend us when we need it, not by a simple order, as the agents of repression do, but with the deep love of a friend. Without a doubt, the Negro Matapacos is the beautiful symbol of love for the revolt, not because it is violence, but because it appeals to the horizon of the future rather than to the recognition of the common mestizaje [mixture] that has us here in the streets thinking of ourselves as part of the common.

The case of the Mapuche flag is not very different. As we have seen, it appears in each protest as a kind of flag of the people, different from that of the State. Obviously in this case there is a matter to resolve with the Mapuche people, because it is a borrowed flag and, at the same time, appropriated. The people recognize themselves in the struggle of the Mapuche people, but they also identify themselves as Mapuche or, at least, the Mapuche function symbolically as the eternally oppressed part of the same people. As it happens with the figure of the Negro Matapacos, the Mapuche flag transports the people to an originary place, the potency of the mixture, which had been whitewashed by years of official history. And now, it comes out just like that, the mestizo body hoisting a flag that in the square no longer means only Mapuche, but all oppressed people. There the Mapuche people are not suppressed as the left in general wanted to do in the past, but rather they appear as a potent singularity as long as everyone knows that this is the Mapuche flag, and also renders as a common potency, since it is the flag of an entire people, to which the heterogeneity that constitutes it has been erased for centuries.

There are also some symbols imposed by power. The most brutal of them is blindness. The eyes of Chileans shot by State violence are the symbol of a government that does not see and does not want others to see. The intervention of the ministries of education trying to reduce the hours of history and philosophy, in addition to the already non-existent civic education, were the first pellets in the eyes, seeking to leave the people one-eyed or blind. And it seemed that they had succeeded. Now we know that the bullet-ridden eyes will be the necessary blindness to not look back. The blindness that sharpens other senses that power does not know how to control. The Negro Matapacos is, at the time of the revolt, the guide dog of the blind.

The symbols of the revolt are strange in normal times. They only make sense when clocks break. However, when historical time resumes its course, the people must preserve the absolute potency that belongs to them. Not to act every moment, but to act when possible. Every time his life is fractured by power, the Negro Matapacos will be able to bite our clothes hard again to remind us of the quiltro that has always made us appear on the scene.

Santiago de Chile, October 2019.

  

*   *   * 

Translated from Spanish to English by Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, reviewed by Jovana Isevski.

The text in Spanish appeared in October 2019, in a dossier published as an indocile reflexive intervention in the midst of the Chilean revolt of October 2019, a dossier in which Michalis Lianos, Gerardo Muñoz, Matías Bascuñán, Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Federico Galende, Mauricio Amar Díaz and Rudy Pradenas participated: "Los estados generales de emergencia. Dossier en movimiento sobre revueltas y crisis neoliberal", p. 61, Ficción de la Razón, octubre de 2019. Link:

https://ficciondelarazon.org/2019/10/29/vvaa-los-estados-generales-de-emergencia-dossier-en-movimiento-sobre-revueltas-y-crisis-neoliberal/ 

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier - La Constitución de 2022 (parte 2). El partido del orden: entre el fundamentalismo y la fake politics.

LA CONSTITUCIÓN DE 2022 (PARTE 2).

EL PARTIDO DEL ORDEN: ENTRE EL FUNDAMENTALISMO Y LA FAKE POLITICS.

 

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier

University of California Riverside

 
 

Fotografía de un falso lienzo de la Brigada Chacón a un costado del GAM (en Santiago de Chile), que asocial al "Apruebo" al "fin de la propiedad privada" y el "derecho a rebelarse y saquear". Fotografía: Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, julio de 2022.

 

2.- EL PARTIDO DEL ORDEN: ENTRE EL FUNDAMENTALISMO Y LA FAKE POLITICS.

La reacción al evento se crispa entre clases políticas profesionales, sectas policiales y militares caídas de la gracia de Dios, conservadores organicistas, neofascismos más o menos esotéricos,[1] empresarios y fundamentalistas neoliberales –aunque entre ellos a veces se den cachetadas de payaso o salgan de noche de cuchillos largos. La reacción se expresa en las exhortaciones y reprimendas dominicales de los patriarcas del partido del orden, esos adultos a cargo que ahora vuelven a la escena pública –entendida como espacio doméstico patriarcal– a pegarnos palmadas en el poto por nuestra infantil insensatez. De ese partido del orden hacen parte los militantes del “partido columnista”[2] (donde figuran en las últimas décadas, sobre todo desde el decanato decimonónico del periodismo golpista que es el diario El Mercurio, prohombres que van desde José Joaquín Brunner hasta Carlos Peña), columnistas que hacen pasar por “opinión pública” lo que no es más que opinión publicada–, además de una miríada de pajes seculares, “analistas de la plaza” y bots. La tesis instalada mediáticamente es que la revuelta de 2019 no tuvo un carácter antineoliberal, sino que más bien manifestó un reclamo de la masa por mayor inclusión en el chorreo de bonanza neoliberal –“el pueblo no quiere derechos sociales, sino más consumo”–, y, por supuesto, que tuvo lugar como un estallido de violencia anómica y delincuencial que hay que “condenar” y reprimir sin reservas. La narrativa política de este discurso establecía así (pretendiendo expresar el “sentido común”) un clivaje entre paz y violencia, o entre orden y desorden –es decir, estabilidad versus inestabilidad, unidad versus desintegración, “Libertad” versus “comunismo” (sic).[3] La represión policial del “estallido” dio paso al castigo económico colectivo y al terrorismo mediático algoritmado: si la política clásica se performaba vía liturgia, ésta devino en las últimas décadas “comunicación política” como construcción de espectáculo con fines políticos y administración de “conflictos entre stakeholders” mediante el regadío de dinero, generando un ecosistema en el que se denomina “pluralismo” a una situación en que la derecha controla todos los mass media, se considera “opinión pública” a la defensa de los intereses del empresariado y se llama “amistad cívica” al lobby y la corrupción. 

              Uno de los fenómenos más llamativos es el delirante y contradictorio vaivén de las derechas contemporáneas entre el fundamentalismo y la fake politics. Desde hace unos años ya teníamos noticia del “método Bannon” (por referencia a Steve Bannon, bank investor y ejecutivo mediático que fue estratega político de la presidencia de Trump en Estados Unidos), método que, mediante uso de bases de datos privados y algoritmos, vía Cambridge Analytics, condicionó favorablemente el resultado de la campaña de Trump –así como también ocurrió con las de Mauricio Macri en Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro en Brasil y el Brexit en el Reino Unido. En Chile este fenómeno se ha venido incrementando paulatinamente hasta alcanzar cotas inusitadas desde la última elección presidencial (Boric / Kast, diciembre de 2021) hasta estas vísperas del plebiscito constitucional de salida del 4 de septiembre de 2022. La táctica consiste en inseminar una catarata de falsedades en el debate público, al hilo de una asonada discursiva que promueve el racismo, el clasismo y el machismo. El mismo otrora candidato presidencial José Antonio Kast defendió a uno de los influencers que posteriormente se convirtió en diputado de su Partido Republicano, Johannes Kaiser, de quien alabó su capacidad de “marcar la pauta en temas de opinión pública”, antes de que el influencer cayera en el ostracismo por sus “excesos” (cuestionando en su podcast el derecho a voto de las mujeres devenidas feministas, tratando de violadores a los inmigrantes negros y sugeriendo que Pinochet no había llevado a cabo de manera suficiente el exterminio de los agentes del “cáncer marxista” de la Unidad Popular tras el golpe de 1973). Digo que se trata de un fenómeno de vaivén delirante y contradictorio porque se trata de una derecha que paradójicamente defiende verdades últimas y esenciales, al mismo tiempo que renuncia a la deuda más elemental que constituye el lazo social: decir la verdad. Si desde el 2006 los estudiantes chilenos, en una suerte de posición filosófica post-kantiana, se plantearon en términos de que la “realidad” no estaba dada así sin más, sino que era una construcción social –es decir, que no tenemos acceso a las cosas en sí, sino a representaciones de las cosas que se construyen o simbolizan socialmente– y que, por tanto, las cosas pueden ser distintas y la realidad social se puede transformar; si eso fue de ese modo, digo, frente a ello el gobierno de Sebastián Piñera se caracterizó por una posición de realismo ingenuo: “las cosas son como son”. Desde tal posición de idiotismo (personalismo y mentira política ligada a la denegación),[4] que proyecta su propio subjetivismo como objetividad, Piñera solía expresar su perplejidad ante la asonada de la imaginación popular que, para él, no era más que un torrente de violencia irracional. No podía entender por qué no se apreciaba su “obra” si ésta iba en la dirección de la racionalidad inherente a la dinámica de las cosas y a la propia “naturaleza humana”, de manera que su gobierno, en un gesto penoso, patético y violento, no podía entender por qué no lo entendían. Piñera, figura radical del idiotismo de la derecha chilena, no podía entender que las cosas se pudieran entender de otra manera, y no podía ver en ello sino la destrucción del mundo –anomia y acosmia, inmundicia y desolación. Piñera y Kast, así como Trump, dan muestra de este idiotismo, llamando a “dejar de lado las ideologías” para afrontar desde el “sentido común” los “problemas reales”, sin reparar en que tal “sentido común” y la manera en la que se percibe lo que son los “problemas reales” son precisamente lo que constituye el corazón de la ideología como articulación pretemática de la práctica social y política habitual en función de la conservación de la facticidad. Hay que atravesar esa fantasía para interrumpir el fascismo, dirían por ahí.

              Sin embargo, lejos de ello, junto con el devenir cibernético de la manipulación discursiva ha proliferado en el arsenal táctico de la derecha la mentira política ligada al subjetivismo y la denegación –todo sea por preservar los privilegios políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales de una clase dominante y su partido del orden mediante sus brazos mediáticos (monopolios periodísticos que pautean y enmarcan el debate público con sus frames; una serie de think tanks de derecha como Libertad y Desarrollo, Fundación Jaime Guzmán y los tentáculos de Cato Institute, vinculados a máquinas de terrorismo mediático como ATLAS Network –donde colaboran personajes como Mario Vargas Llosa, Teresa Marinovic, Sergio Melnick, José Antonio Kast y Rojo Edwards–, o neofascistas como Alexis López, quien desde una lectura caricaturesca de Deleuze y el “deconstruccionismo” (sic) ha exportado un “análisis” de la revuelta acéfala chilena como “revolución molecular disipada” a Colombia, como asesor del uribismo). Desde ahí se ha ido configurando un conjunto bien irrigado de ecosistemas digitales de desinformación y ejércitos de bots que tienen como rendimiento la inundación de la escena pública con fake news: que de aprobarse el nuevo texto constitucional nos van a expropiar desde las casas y los fondos de pensiones hasta el cepillo de dientes; que vamos a ser gobernados por comunistas totalitarios, inmigrantes tercermundistas, indígenas retrógrados, homosexuales salidos de la corte de Calígula, ecologistas objetores del progreso y feministas amazonas insurrectas y funadoras que quieren acabar con la masculinidad chilensis y que, por si fuera poco, podrán abortar “horas antes de parir” (legalización del infanticidio); que el avance del supuesto proceso democrático no sería más que un gigantesco fraude electoral (con voto de chavistas venezolanos, inmigrantes haitianos e izquierdistas muertos en el padrón electoral); que las manifestaciones multitudinarias del “apruebo” son montajes mediáticos; que el Estado nos va a quitar el agua para dársela a los indios; que se va a borrar la jerarquía entre el alma humana y la vida animal; que los “blancos” van a ser ciudadanos de segunda clase; que los cristianos van a tener que esconderse en catacumbas de la persecución nihilista de los postmarxistas; que vamos a perder nuestra “soberanía” al ser incorporados bajo la égida de un gobierno mundial orquestado por la ONU y todo tipo de siniestras camarillas terrícolas y extraterrestres; y un largo etc. Mención especial merece el discurso sobre el devenir “Chilezuela”, que prolifera tanto entre inmigrantes venezolanos como entre los chilenos. Se trata de un discurso que un sector de los inmigrantes venezolanos de derecha esgrimen a partir de la mala experiencia que tuvieron con el proceso constituyente del chavismo y que tiene un eco en el discurso de la derecha chilena –reproducido a través de los medios e inseminado en la población–, pero que no resiste análisis y constituye una grosera equivalenciación de procesos cualitativamente diferentes: se trata de una traducción mecánica y grosera de eventos que son intraducibles entre sí.

Quizás lo más alarmante, sin embargo y más allá de la escena chilena en particular, sea la redirección de las energías populares a la turbulencia administrada de la guerra –en una nueva versión de la doctrina del shock: de la crisis al miedo y, en virtud del miedo, la promoción de la aceptación de medidas contra los trabajadores (“economía de guerra”) y de una derechización ideológica generalizada. Esto no sólo sobrecodifica geopolíticamente toda la escena (redistribuyendo las preocupaciones, energías y tensiones), sino que también es una asonada reaccionaria del imaginario viril contra la potencia transformadora del feminismo, asonada que logra reinstalar una política de las pasiones tristes en orden a la fascistización de las poblaciones –en el miedo a mayor mal se incita la predisposición a la protección de “esta vida” en sus actuales condiciones– y desoculta, en un horizonte más amplio, la ruina autoinmunitaria de la gubernamentalidad liberal clásica (modernista, ideal de autonomía de la sociedad civil) y el devenir regla de las nuevas formas de gubernamentalidad neoliberal autoritaria (cibernética y militarizada --desde los algoritmos e interfaces mediáticas hasta los tanques y los drones).

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[1] Véase Oporto, Lucy, «He aquí el lugar donde debes armarte de fortaleza. Ensayos y crónica filosófica», Editorial Katankura, Santiago, ¹2022.

[2] La expresión “militantes del Partido columnista” es de Marcos Ortiz, director de Ojo del Medio –observatorio de medios chilenos. Cfr. Ortiz, Marcos, “Los 7 mandamientos del Partido Columnista”, en sitio electrónico Interferencia, 17 de marzo de 2022; y en entrevista en podcast La Base # 73, junio de 2022, enlace:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdri6mazEyw  

Véase también Karmy, Rodrigo, “Pinochetismo cyborg”, en sitio electrónico Lobo suelto, 24 de noviembre de 2021, donde Karmy caracteriza al columnismo reaccionario de El Mercurio como el “cogito del partido del orden”.

[3] Karmy, “Pinochetismo cyborg”.

[4] Véase Villalobos-Ruminott, “Imperialidad y verdad. Primera parte: mentir en política”, en sitio electrónico Infrapolitical Deconstruction, 31 de octubre de 2021.  

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier - La Constitución de 2022 (parte 1). El interregno: ¿Darse o no darse al rey?

 

LA CONSTITUCIÓN DE 2022 (PARTE 1). 

EL INTERREGNO: ¿DARSE O NO DARSE AL REY?

  

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier

University of California Riverside

 

Fotograma de Derek Jarman (dir.), “Jubilee”, UK, 1976.

 

 1.- EL INTERREGNO: ¿DARSE O NO DARSE AL REY?

 Situados en el interregno entre la revuelta acéfala de octubre de 2019 –que involucraba la potencia de la revuelta feminista de 2018– y el plebiscito de salida sobre la nueva Constitución de 2022, es interesante calibrar las intensidades que tejen el campo de fuerzas en esta coyuntura y su disyunción. La traza heterocrónica de la revuelta, no datable historiográficamente, abre un tiempo anárquico, acéfalo, desarticulado: un tiempo en que la guerra civil que nos recorre (pues la polis siempre está fracturada) se hace explícita como una violencia de las formas que desborda el estatuto mismo de la guerra fascista que cierra el mundo y lo interrumpe, desobrando sus máquinas categoriales, identitarias y patriarco-relacionales, destituyendo sus mitologemas, sus patronazgos, sus pastorales y sus aparatos de organización autónoma de la dominación y la explotación –evangelización, civilización, democracia neoliberal. Sin embargo, el “fantasma portaliano” –para usar la fórmula que Karmy acuña para señalar la lógica y el imaginario político autoritario instalados por el ministro Diego Portales y que recorren la historia de Chile desde el siglo XIX–,[1] instanciado como un partido del orden que bloquea toda profundización democrática en virtud de la cual los pueblos puedan convertirse en agentes de su propia historia,[2] despliega una asonada de terror mediático, económico y bélico que hoy opera una suerte de paradigma inmunitario contra todas las formas de proliferación de vida pagana o anarquización democrática que han tenido lugar desde fines de los sesenta y contra el acontecimiento histórico de que un pueblo plural-singular insolentado haya puesto en juego la realización de una de las ideas fundamentales del pensamiento liberal moderno –que el pueblo se dé su propia Constitución. Es decir, frente al evento de la desarticulación de las formas arcónticas y oligárquicas de la institución del pensamiento moderno –y de su pensamiento de la institución en todos sus registros–, nos quieren arrastrar no sólo hacia un momento previo al 68 (en virtud de una “batalla cultural” esgrimida en función de una contrarrevolución conservadora o gramscismo invertido) sino, incluso, a un momento previo a la revolución francesa de fines del siglo XVIII (revocando la mentada promesa democrática de que el pueblo se dé su propia Constitución). 

        Pero ¿en qué tipo de interregno estamos? ¿qué significa estar situados entre las trazas de la revuelta y el fantasma portaliano? ¿Se trata el mentado “interregno” de un estar entre dos reinos (inter-regnum), entre dos territorializaciones soberano-gubernamentales? ¿Es el tiempo del peligro y la suspensión de la soberanía un mero hiatus irrationalis transicional entre dos hegemonías y dos regímenes de producción? ¿Se trata de un evento discreto de violencia transicional entre dos formas de imperium organizadas, personificadas de manera vicaria o automatizadas en gobernanza abstracta, y en cualquier caso ciertamente autoinmunizadas de la contingencia material de la potencia imaginal de los pueblos figurantes? En nuestro caso, la traza de la revuelta no se reduce a la constituyente, pero se puede expresar en ella, sin cerrarla en nuevo régimen, sustrayéndose de la dialéctica entre potencia destituyente y poder constituyente, manteniendo la potencia de la imaginación excéntrica respecto del cierre y centramiento de todo imaginario y regencia. En medio del humo de las barricadas y las cenizas de los conceptos políticos clásicos, en tiempo disjunto (time out of joint), el devenir destituyente ha atravesado hasta hoy, entre otros senderos, el de un conato constituyente en orden a la derogación del cadáver jurídico-institucional neoliberal legado por la última dictadura manu militari. Este conato implica pensar no sólo una nueva relacionalidad entre las cosas y entre los mundos, sino ante todo otra relación no dispositiva entre vida y ley –una relación protésica con la ley que se sustraiga de toda sacralización de la misma. La pregunta sigue siendo, como siempre, “darse o no darse al rey” –pero evitando el desenlace de restauración y reconciliación que sella, por ejemplo, el célebre relato de Lope de Vega en «Fuenteovejuna».[3] Sigue siendo una tarea pensar la relación entre potencia destituyente y conato constituyente, pero sin que lo segundo neutralice a lo primero en el sentido de una “superación” (Aufhebung), sino como la violencia del evento inscrito en las formas de un modo irreductible. A la larga inconmensurables, el proceso de la asamblea constituyente no deja atrás la revuelta ni la encauza mediante una ritualización institucional –como quisiera el sociologismo que esgrime el discurso de la “anomia”–, sino que le da una ocasión de expresión a su potencia –que es potencia común de imaginar y no reduce lo común ni al Estado ni a dispositivo categorial-atributivo de la persona alguno.

 

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[1] Karmy, Rodrigo, «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, ¹2022. El “fantasma portaliano”, lejos de instalar un trascendental fáctico, remite a la continuidad diferida de una lógica principial y axiomática que ha sostenido el imaginario político y el habitus de las clases dominantes oligárquicas desde la época de la transición de la colonia a la república chilena. Es parte de su performance, precisamente, autoafirmarse como aparato trascendental de legitimidad y legalidad.  

[2] Marx, Karl, «El 18 Brumario de Luis Bonaparte», Ediciones Fundación Federico Engels, Madrid, ¹2003.

[3] Vega, Lope de, «Fuente Ovejuna», Ediciones Cátedra, Madrid, ¹1994.

Jacques Camatte - Muerte y extinción: a propósito de la invasión de Ucrania.

El texto que aquí traducimos del inglés al español fue publicado originalmente por Jacques Camatte en francés bajo el título “Mort et Extinction”, en Revue Invariance, el 10 de marzo de 2022:

https://revueinvariance.pagesperso-orange.fr/

El texto que he tenido a la vista para la traducción es: Jacques Camatte, “Death and Extinction. Concerning the Invasion of Ukraine”, traducción del francés al inglés por Francesco Borselli, en Il Covile (English edition), nº 632 / XIV, 19 de abril de 2022:

https://www.ilcovile.it/

Jacques Camatte

 Muerte y extinción.
A propósito de la invasión de Ucrania.

 

El momento de la invasión de Ucrania me impuso la siguiente cuestión: ¿es esta dinámica de muerte una máscara de nuestro devenir hacia la extinción? ¿O es el devenir a la extinción lo que precisamente condiciona este nuevo montaje de la matanza, de la guerra en su forma antigua (no la guerra cibernética), visible y tocante a la lucha por la supervivencia? Pero, de hecho, esto aplica a todos los conflictos armados actuales, que no comenzaron ayer.

 

Lo que se pone fundamentalmente de relieve es la importancia de la amenaza por ambos lados, pero especialmente del lado ruso. Y esto: el desencadenamiento de la enemistad. Los ucranianos reaccionaron al ataque ruso defendiéndose enérgicamente, lo cual es lógico y está ampliamente justificado; pero esto fue acompañado por un desencadenamiento de odio no sólo por parte de rusos y ucranianos, sino por parte de los que se llaman occidentales y apoyan a los ucranianos. De modo que la defensa de los ucranianos y la demonización de los rusos han sido la principal preocupación de los medios, enmascarando, ocultando la cuestión del Covid 19 (curiosa y repentinamente ya no se considera peligroso y las medidas contra él pronto serán derogadas) y la publicación del IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) que destaca el grave peligro del calentamiento global y, por tanto, el aumento del riesgo de extinción.

 

Los rusos se han sentido amenazados desde hace mucho tiempo, especialmente desde el fin de la Unión Soviética, y es importante recordar que, en ese momento, ellos liquidaron el Pacto de Varsovia e incluso propusieron unirse a la OTAN –ya que volvían a ser amigos como lo habían sido durante la guerra contra Alemania. “La seguridad paneuropea es un sueño”, se les respondió. La realidad es la enemistad, y Estados Unidos necesitaba un enemigo. Tener un enemigo permite protegerse de una amenaza haciéndola visible gracias a algún tipo de encarnación. Esta situación no ha hecho más que incrementarse más y más hasta hoy.[1]

 

De hecho, tenemos que remontarnos más atrás en el tiempo para encontrar los fundamentos de esta enemistad: a la Revolución de Octubre de 1917, que generó una gran amenaza –que pareció tener un fundamento real durante un corto período, pero que, de manera atenuada, persistió incluso después del final de la fase revolucionaria–, así como la enemistad contra el proletariado que estaba ligado a ella. Esta enemistad duró hasta fines del siglo pasado, cuando el proletariado desapareció y fue reemplazado por estratos sociales dominados y explotados en diversos grados. Se podría decir que, hasta hoy, más o menos inconscientemente, se culpa a los rusos de haber hecho la revolución.

 

Hemos afirmado varias veces que la especie humana trata continuamente de ponerse en guardia contra una amenaza. Esta puesta en guardia se actualiza tanto a nivel de naciones como de individuos: de ahí los diferentes conflictos que pueblan la historia. La muerte aparece como el medio de escapar de la amenaza.[2] Esta es una explicación de la intervención rusa en Ucrania, pero no una justificación. Más aún: cuanto más se lucha contra una amenaza, más se la refuerza, como muestra el caso de Rusia en lo que hace al presente y lo que viene.

 

Esta dinámica –que provoca guerras que destruyen a hombres, mujeres, pero también a la naturaleza (hecho que muchas veces queda encubierto)– aumenta el riesgo de extinción porque exalta la enemistad que es la causa esencial del calentamiento global ligada a la destrucción de la naturaleza misma. Se trata de una dinámica que no encuentra ningún obstáculo porque se sustenta en otra dinámica: la de la autonomización de la forma capital –que fue capaz de imponerse gracias a la desaparición del proletariado– expresada a través de la necesidad de una constante innovación que induce a la obsolescencia de lo producido así como de los productores no innovadores o insuficientes, generando una amenaza acompañada de una enemistad en el seno de la realidad social y económica, complementaria a la de lo superfluo de los seres humanos, contribuyendo todo ello a la creación de condiciones de vida donde “¿No es más deseable la muerte que esa vida que es una mera medida preventiva contra la muerte?” (Marx). De hecho, incluso la muerte no puede resolver nada, porque no puede abolir la cada vez más cercana víspera de la extinción. La humanidad sólo puede escapar de ella abandonando la enemistad como forma y principio de vida.

 

Jacques Camatte, 10 de marzo de 2022.

*   *   *

 

Traducción del inglés al español por Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier.

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[1] Muchos documentos que prueban la validez de esta proposición están disponibles en Internet. Por otro lado, debemos mencionar el pasado nazi de Ucrania, que fue una amenaza para la URSS, ahora Rusia, pero fue igualmente una fuerza contra la Alemania nazi. Recordemos también esto: “De hecho, la crisis que llevó a la disolución de la URSS y del bloque del Este no es un fenómeno local que concierne sólo a estos países sino un fenómeno global: el fin de la oposición capital-trabajo y la evanescencia del fenómeno de la propiedad basada en la tierra; la plena eliminación de los límites al devenir del capital y la realización de un desarrollo no antagónico, no dialéctico. Más exactamente, hay una disolución del conflicto por su generalización dentro de la comunidad-sociedad del capital. Esto conmociona profundamente los cerebros de los humanos que están acostumbrados a pensar solo en términos de conflicto y polarización entre dos campos. El escenario ahora alcanzado por el capital impone a hombres y mujeres la necesidad de vivir sin enemigos, lo que socava todas sus representaciones y causa el actual desconcierto, que corre el riesgo de ser sólo transitorio porque los enemigos se transforman en competidores, en verdaderos actores capitalistas. Se necesita algún tiempo para eliminar las viejas representaciones” (Epílogo al «Manifiesto comunista de 1848», escrito en 1991).

[2] Cfr. la consigna franquista: ¡Viva la muerte!