Categoría: Artículos

Imperialismo y globalización
Samir Amin
Globalización. Argentina, junio del 2001.

El imperialismo no es una etapa, ni siquiera la etapa más alta del capitalismo: desde el comienzo es inherente a la expansión del capitalismo. La conquista imperialista del planeta por los europeos y sus hijos estadounidenses, se realizó en dos fases, y quizás esté entrando en la tercera.
La primera fase de esta empresa en desarrollo, se organizó en torno a la conquista de las Américas, dentro del marco del sistema mercantil de la Europa Atlántica de aquella época. El resultado claro fue la destrucción de las civilizaciones indígenas y la Hispanización /Cristianización o simplemente el genocidio total sobre el que se construyó los EEUU.
El racismo fundamental de los colonos Anglo-Sajones explica por qué el modelo se reprodujo en todas partes, en Australia, en Tasmania (el genocidio más completo de la historia), y en Nueva Zelandia. Pues si los católicos españoles actuaban en nombre de la religión que debía ser impuesta a los pueblos conquistados, los protestantes anglo-sajones derivaban de su particular lectura de la Biblia el derecho a eliminar a los “infieles”.
La infame esclavitud de los negros, que se hizo necesaria tras el exterminio de los indios, se impuso bruscamente para asegurar que las partes útiles del continente pudieran ser explotadas. Nadie hoy día puede dudar de los motivos reales de todos estos horrores, al menos que se ignora su relación íntima con la expansión del capital. Sin embargo, los europeos contemporáneos aceptaron el discurso ideológico que los justificaba-y las voces de protesta como la del Padre Las Casas-no encontraron muchos simpatizantes.
Los desastrosos resultados que produjo este primer capítulo de la expansión capitalista mundial, hizo que más tarde las fuerzas de liberación desafiaran la lógica de su producción. La primera revolución del hemisferio Occidental fue la de los esclavos de Santo Domingo (lo que hoy es Haití) , a fines del siglo XVIII, seguida más de un siglo después por la revolución mexicana de la década de 1910, y cincuenta años después por la revolución Cubana. Y si no cito aquí la famosa “revolución Americana” o las de las colonias de España que la siguieron, es porque éstas sólo transfirieron el poder de decisión de las metrópolis a los colonos de modo que éstos continuaron haciendo lo mismo, persiguiendo los mismos proyectos aún con mayor brutalidad, sólo que sin tener que compartir las ganancias con “la madre patria”.
La segunda fase de la devastación imperialista se basó en la revolución industrial y se manifestó en la sujeción colonial de Asia y de África. “Para abrir los mercados”-como el mercado del opio que fue impuesto a los chinos por los puritanos de Inglaterra-y apoderarse de los recursos naturales del globo fueron los motivos reales aquí, como ya todos saben. Pero una vez más, la opinión europea -incluyendo al movimiento obrero de la Segunda Internacional-no ve estas realidades y acepta el nuevo discurso legitimador del capital. En esta ocasión se trató de la famosa “misión civilizadora”.
Las voces que expresaron el pensamiento más claro de la época fueron las de los burgueses cínicos, como Cecil Rhodes, que apreció la conquista colonial como un antídoto a la revolución social en Inglaterra. Una vez más, las voces de protesta-desde la Comuna de Paris a los bolcheviques-tuvieron poca resonancia. Esta segunda fase del imperialismo está en el origen del más grande problema con el que se ha enfrentado la humanidad: la inmensa polarización que ha aumentado la desigualdad entre las gentes de una proporción de dos a uno en los alrededores del 1800, a la de 60 a 1 en nuestros días, en donde sólo el 20% de la población mundial queda incluida en los centros que se benefician con el sistema.
Al mismo tiempo, esos prodigiosos logros de la civilización capitalista dieron lugar a las más violentas confrontaciones entre los poderes imperialistas que el mundo haya visto. La agresión imperialista otra vez produjo las fuerzas que resistieron ese proyecto: las revoluciones socialistas que ocurrieron en Rusia y en China (de un modo nada de accidental, todas ocurrieron en periferias que eran víctimas de la expansión polarizadora del capitalismo realmente existente) y las revoluciones de liberación nacional. Su victoria dio medio siglo de respiro, tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que alimentó la ilusión de que el capitalismo, obligado a ajustarse a las nuevas situaciones, al menos se las había arreglado para llegar a civilizarse.
La cuestión del imperialismo (y tras ésta, su opuesto-la liberación y el desarrollo) han continuado pesando en la historia del capitalismo hasta el presente. Así la victoria de los movimientos de liberación que justo después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial gana la independencia política de naciones de Asia y de África, no sólo puso fin al sistema del colonialismo sino que, también, de cierta manera llevó al final de la era de la expansión Europea que había comenzado en 1492.

Durante cuatro siglos y medio, desde 1500 a 1950, esa expansión había sido la forma adoptada por el desarrollo del capitalismo histórico, de modo que estos dos aspectos de la misma realidad habían llegado a ser inseparables. Para ser más exactos, el “sistema mundial del 1492” ya había sido roto a finales del siglo XVIII y a comienzos del XIX por la independencia de las América. Pero esta quiebra había sido sólo aparente, ya que la referida independencia se alcanzó, no por los indígenas o los esclavos importados por los colonos (excepto en Haití) sino por los mismos colonos, que intentaron transformar a América en una segunda Europa. La independencia reconquistada por los pueblos de Asia y África buscó un significado diferente.

Las clases dirigentes de los países coloniales de Europa no dejaron de entender que se había dado vuelta una página en la historia. Se dieron cuenta que debían abandonar el punto de vista tradicional de que el crecimiento de su economía capitalista doméstica estaba unido al éxito en la expansión imperial. Era el punto de vista que había sido mantenido no sólo por los poderes coloniales-primordialmente Inglaterra, Francia y Holanda-sino también por los nuevos centros capitalistas formados en el siglo XIX-Alemania, EEUU y Japón. De acuerdo a esto, los conflictos intra-Europeos e internacionales eran primordialmente luchas por las colonias del sistema imperialista de 1492. Se entendía que los EEUU se reservaban para sí los derechos exclusivos sobre todo el nuevo continente.
La construcción de un gran espacio Europeo -desarrollado, rico, que contara con un potencial tecnológico y científico de primera clase, y fuertes tradiciones militares-pareció constituir una sólida alternativa sobre la que se podía basar el nuevo crecimiento de la acumulación capitalista, “sin colonias”—.esto es, sobre la base de un nuevo tipo de globalización, diferente a la del sistema de 1492. El problema que quedaba en pie, era cómo, de qué manera, este nuevo sistema mundial podía diferenciarse del antiguo, si continuaba siendo tan polarizado como el anterior, aún con una nueva base, o si dejara de ser así.
Sin duda, esta construcción, que está muy lejos de terminarse, pero que sí está atravesando una crisis que pone en cuestión su significado a largo plazo, sigue siendo una tarea difícil. No se han encontrado todavía fórmulas que hagan posible la reconciliación de las realidades históricas de cada nación, que tanto pesan sobre la formación de una Europa políticamente unida. Agréguese a eso, la visión de cómo este espacio económico y político europeo pueda calzar con el nuevo sistema global, que tampoco está construido, lo hace que todo permanezca ambiguo, para no decir nebuloso.
¿Será este espacio económico el rival del otro gran espacio, el que fue creado en la segunda Europa por los EEUU? De ser así, ¿de qué modo esta rivalidad afectará las relaciones de Europa y de los EEUU con el resto del mundo? ¿O actuarán en concierto? En este caso, ¿los europeos aceptarán participar como socios en esta nueva versión del sistema imperialista de 1492, manteniendo sus opciones políticas en conformidad con Washington? ¿Bajo qué condiciones la construcción de Europa podría ser parte de una globalización que pusiera fin definitivo al sistema de 1492?
Hoy presenciamos el comienzo de una tercera ola de devastación del mundo por una expansión imperialista, apoyada por el colapso del sistema Soviético y de los regímenes nacionalistas populares del Tercer Mundo. Los objetivos del capital dominante siguen siendo los mismos -el control de la expansión de los mercados, el saqueo de los recursos naturales de la tierra, la superexplotación de las reservas de trabajo en la periferia-aún cuando todo esto se persiga bajo condiciones que son nuevas y en muchos respectos muy diferentes de las que caracterizaron la fase precedente del imperialismo.
El discurso ideológico diseñado para asegurar el predominio de los pueblos de la tríada central (EEUU.Europa Occidental y Japón), ha sido remozado y ahora se funda en “el derecho a intervenir”, que supuestamente se justifica en “la defensa de la democracia”, “los derechos de los pueblos” y en el “humanitarismo”. Los ejemplos de duplicidad son tan flagrantes que para africanos y asiáticos llega a ser obvio el cinismo con que se usa este lenguaje. La opinión occidental, sin embargo, ha respondido con el mismo entusiasmo como frente a las justificaciones de las primeras fases del imperialismo.
Todavía más: para alcanzar este fin, los EEUU lleva a cabo una estrategia sistemática diseñada para asegurar su absoluta hegemonía mediante una demostración de poder militar que consolida tras él a todos los socios de la Tríada. Desde este punto de vista, la guerra de Kosovo cumplió con una función crucial, obtener la total capitulación de los estados de Europa, que apoyaron la posición americana sobre los nuevos “conceptos estratégicos” adoptados por la OTAN, inmediatamente después de “la victoria” en Yugoslavia en abril23-25, de 1999.
En este “nuevo concepto” (referido rudamente al otro lado del Atlántico como “la doctrina Clinton”), la misión de la OTAN queda, para todos los fines prácticos, extendida a toda el Asia y el África (LOS EE.UU, ya desde la Doctrina Monroe, se reservaba el derecho a intervenir en América), lo que viene a ser una admisión de que la OTAN ya no es una alianza defensiva sino un arma ofensiva de los EEUU. Al mismo tiempo, esta misión es definida en los términos más vagos que se pudiera imaginar, para incluir nuevas “amenazas” (crimen internacional, “terrorismo”, el “peligroso” armamento de países que están fuera de la OTAN, etc.), lo que llanamente hace posible justificar casi cualquier agresión que pudiera antojársele a los EEUU. Clinton, no se hizo de rogar para referirse a “estados deshonestos”, a los que habría que atacar “preventivamente”, sin especificar lo que quería decir por la tal deshonestidad.
Agréguese que la OTAN se libera de toda obligación para actuar sólo bajo un mandato de las Naciones Unidas, que es tratada con un desprecio similar al que mostraron los poderes fascistas con la Liga de las Naciones (hay una asombrosa similitud en los términos utilizados).
La ideología americana es cuidadosa en empacar su mercancía, el proyecto imperialista, en el inefable lenguaje de “la misión histórica de los EEUU”. Una tradición heredada desde los comienzos por “los padres fundadores”, seguros de su inspiración divina. Los liberales americanos -en el sentido político del término, los que se consideran a “la izquierda” en su sociedad-comparten esta ideología. De acuerdo con esto, presentan la hegemonía americana como necesariamente “benigna”, la fuente del progreso en escrúpulos morales y en la práctica democrática, que necesariamente están ahí para dar ventajas a quienes, a sus ojos, no son víctimas de este proyecto, sino sus beneficiarios. La hegemonía Americana, la paz universal, la democracia y el progreso material se juntan como términos inseparables. Por supuesto, la realidad queda en cualquier otra parte.
La increíble extensión en que la opinión pública europea (y particularmente la opinión de la izquierda, en lugares en donde tiene la mayoría) se ha juntado en torno a este proyecto -la opinión pública en los EEUU es tan ingenua que no plantea ningún problema-es una catástrofe que no dejará de tener consecuencias. Las intensas campañas de los medios, enfocadas hacia regiones hacia donde se dirige la intervención americana, sin duda explica este amplio acuerdo. Pero más allá de eso, la gente en Occidente está persuadida de eso porque los EEUU y los países de la Unión Europea son “democráticos”, sus gobiernos son incapaces de tener “malas intenciones”, algo que queda reservado solamente a los sangrientos “dictadores” del Oriente. Están tan cegados por esta convicción que olvidan la influencia decisiva de los intereses del capital dominante. Y así, una vez más los pueblos de los países imperialistas se niegan una conciencia clara.
Desarrollo y Democracia: los aspectos inseparables de un mismo movimiento
La democracia es uno de los requerimientos absolutos del desarrollo. Pero todavía tenemos que explicar por qué, y bajo qué condiciones, porque es sólo muy recientemente que esta idea ha sido, al parecer, generalmente aceptada. Hasta hace poco el dogma dominante en Occidente, en el Oriente y en el Sur, era que la democracia era un “lujo” que sólo podía llegar cuando “el desarrollo” hubiera solucionado los problemas materiales de la sociedad. Esa fue la doctrina oficial compartida por los círculos dirigentes del mundo capitalista (por los EEUU para justificar su apoyo a los dictadores militares de América Latina, y a los Europeos para justificar sus propios regímenes autocráticos en África); por los estados del Tercer Mundo (en donde el desarrollismo latinoamericano se expresó tan claramente); y por Costa de Marfil, Kenya, Malawi, y muchos otros países que demostraron que los países socialistas no fueron los únicos en gobernarse con partidos únicos; y por los gobernantes del sistema soviético.
Pero ahora, de la noche a la mañana, la proposición se ha invertido en su opuesto. En todas partes, o en casi todas partes, hay un discurso oficial cotidiano acerca de la preocupación por la democracia, la certificación de la democratización, otorgada en debida forma, es una “condición” `para obtener ayuda de las grandes y ricas democracias, etc. La credibilidad de esta retórica es particularmente dudosa cuando el principio de “doble estándar”, que es aplicado en perfecto cinismo, de un modo tan liso y llano revela en la práctica la verdadera prioridad dada a otros objetivos no dados a conocer, que los círculos dominantes intentan alcanzar por pura y simple manipulación. Esto no es negar que ciertos movimientos sociales, aunque no todos, realmente pueden tener objetivos democráticos, o que la democracia es realmente la condición del desarrollo.
Democracia es un concepto moderno, en el sentido de que coincide con la misma definición de modernidad -si, como sugiero, entendemos por modernidad la adopción del principio de que los seres humanos individual y colectivamente (esto es, como sociedades) son responsables de su historia. Antes de que formularan tal concepto, los pueblos tuvieron que liberarse de las alineaciones características de las formas de poder que precedieron al capitalismo, fueran estas las alineaciones de la religión o las que tomaban la forma de las “tradiciones” concebidas como permanentes, como hechos transhistóricos.
Las expresiones de la modernidad, y de la necesidad de democracia que se implicaba, datan de la Edad de la Ilustración. La modernidad en cuestión es por eso sinónimo de capitalismo, y la democracia que él produjo es limitada como el resto, como lo es el mismo capitalismo. En sus formas históricas burguesas-que son las únicas conocidas y practicadas hasta ahora-se constituye sólo como un “estadio”. Ni la modernidad ni la democracia han alcanzado el extremo de su desarrollo potencial. Es por eso que prefiero el término “democratización”, que enfatiza el aspecto dinámico de un proceso todavía no terminado, al término “democracia”, que refuerza la ilusión de que podemos dar con una fórmula definitiva para él.

El pensamiento social burgués se ha basado desde sus comienzos, desde la Ilustración, en la separación entre los diferentes dominios de la vida social – entre otros, su manejo económico y su manejo político-y la adopción de diferentes principios específicos que se suponen son la expresión de demandas particulares de la “razón” en cada uno de estos dominios. De acuerdo con este punto de vista, la democracia es el principio razonable de la buena administración política.

Desde que los hombres (en aquella época, no había ninguna razón para incluir a las mujeres), o , más precisamente, ciertos hombres (aquellos que estaban bien educados o bien acomodados), son razonables, ellos tendrían la responsabilidad de hacer leyes bajo las cuales vivir y de seleccionar, por elección, a aquellas personas que se encargaran de ejecutar tales leyes. Por otra parte, la vida económica, es dirigida por otros principios que también eran concebidos como la expresión de demandas de la “razón” (sinónimo de naturaleza humana): la propiedad privada, el derecho a ser empresario, la competencia en los mercados. Conocemos este grupo de principios como los del capitalismo, que en sí mismos nada tienen que ver con los principios de la democracia.

Este es el caso especialmente si pensamos la democracia como implicando igualdad —-la igualdad de los hombres y las mujeres, por supuesto, pero también la de todos los seres humanos (teniendo en mente que la democracia Americana olvidó a sus esclavos hasta 1865 y olvidó todos los más elementales derechos civiles para sus descendientes hasta 1960), de los propietarios y los no propietarios (nótese que la propiedad privada sólo existe cuando es exclusiva, esto es, cuando hay quienes no tienen nada).

La separación de los dominios políticos y económicos inmediatamente alza la cuestión de la convergencia o divergencia de los resultados de las lógicas específicas que los gobiernan. En otras palabras, ¿podría la “democracia” ( signo taquigráfico que se pone por gobierno de la vida política) y el “mercado” (signo taquigráfico por el gobierno de la actividad económica), ser vistas como convergentes o divergentes? El postulado donde se funda el discurso en uso, y que es elevado al estatus de verdad tan auto-sustentada y evidente que no hay necesidad de discutirla, afirma que los dos términos convergen.

La democracia y el mercado supuestamente se engendran recíprocamente, la democracia requiere al mercado y vise-versa. Y nada puede estar más lejos de la verdad, como lo demuestra la historia real. Los pensadores de la Ilustración eran sin embargo más exigentes que el común de nuestros contemporáneos. Al revés de estos últimos, se preguntaban por qué había convergencia y bajo qué condiciones. Su respuesta a la primera pregunta se inspiraba en su concepto de “Razón”, el común denominador de los modos de gobierno intentados para la democracia y el mercado. Si los hombres son razonables, entonces los resultados de sus opciones políticas podían sólo venir a reforzar los resultados producidos por el mercado.
Esto, entonces, bajo la condición, obviamente, de que el ejercicio de los derechos democráticos esté reservada a seres provistos de razón, es decir, ciertos hombres -no mujeres, quienes, como sabemos, son guiadas solamente por sus emociones y no por la razón; no, por supuesto, los esclavos, los pobres, y los desposeídos (los proletarios) , que sólo obedecen a sus instintos. La Democracia debe pues basarse en calificaciones de propiedad, y quedar reservada a aquellos que simultáneamente son ciudadanos y empresarios. Entonces, naturalmente, es probable que sus opciones electorales sean siempre, o casi siempre, consistentes con sus intereses como capitalistas. Pero eso al mismo tiempo significa que en su convergencia con la economía, por no decir su subordinación, la política pierde su autonomía. La alineación economicista funciona aquí en plenitud, ocultando este hecho.
La ulterior extensión de los derechos democráticos a otros más allá de los ciudadanos empresarios, no fue el resultado espontáneo del desarrollo capitalista o la expresión de un requisito de tal desarrollo. Muy por el contrario, esos derechos fueron ganados gradualmente por las víctimas del sistema-la clase obrera, y más adelante, las mujeres. Fue el resultado de luchas contra el sistema, y aún si el sistema se las arreglaba para adaptarse a ellas, para “recuperar” sus beneficios, como se dice. ¿Cómo y a qué costo? Esa es la pregunta que debemos hacer aquí.
Esta extensión de los derechos necesariamente revela una contradicción expresada a través del voto democrático entre la voluntad de la mayoría (los explotados por el sistema) y el destino que el mercado tiene reservado para ellos; el sistema corre el riesgo de tornarse inestable, aún explosivo. Al menos, existe el riesgo -y la posibilidad-de que el mercado en cuestión deba someterse a la expresión de los intereses sociales, que no coincide con el máximo de beneficio del capital, al cual el dominio económico da prioridad. En otras palabras, existe el riesgo para algunos (el capital) y la posibilidad para otros (los obreros-ciudadanos) de que el mercado sea regulado en términos diferentes de esos que trabajaban con la estricta lógica unilateral: Eso es posible, por supuesto, y bajo ciertas condiciones llegó a ocurrir, como en el estado de bienestar de la posguerra.
Pero ese no es el único modo posible de apaciguar la divergencia entre la democracia y el mercado. Si la historia concreta produce circunstancias tales que los movimientos de crítica social lleguen a estar fragmentados e impotentes, y que la consecuencia llegue a ser no tener alternativas frente a la ideología dominante, entonces la democracia es vaciada de todo contenido que la lleve hacia el camino del mercado, y puede llegar a ser peligrosa para él. Usted puede votar libremente, de la manera que se le antoje: blanco, azul, verde, rosado o rojo. Haga lo que haga, no surtirá efecto, ya que su destino es resuelto en otra parte, fuera de los recintos del parlamento, en el mercado. La subordinación de la democracia al mercado (y no su convergencia) se refleja en el lenguaje de la política. La palabra “alternancia” (cambiar la cara del poder mientras se sigue haciendo lo mismo) ha reemplazado a la palabra “alternativa” (que significa hacer algo diferente).
Esta alternancia que implica solamente a un remanente insignificante dejado por la regulación del mercado, es en los hechos un signo de que la democracia está en crisis. Debilita la credibilidad y la legitimidad de los procedimientos democráticos y puede rápidamente llevar a un reemplazo de la democracia por un consenso ilusorio basado, por ejemplo, en el chauvinismo religioso o étnico. Desde el comienzo, la tesis de que habría una convergencia “natural” entre la democracia y el mercado contenía el peligro de que llegáramos a este punto. Presupone una sociedad reconciliada consigo misma, una sociedad sin conflicto, como lo sugiere alguna interpretación posmodernista.
Pero la evidencia es concluyente en el sentido de que las relaciones del mercado capitalista global han generado aún más grandes desigualdades. La teoría de la convergencia – la noción de que el mercado y la democracia convergen-es hoy puro dogma: una teoría para una política imaginaria. Esta teoría es, en su propio dominio, la contrapartida de la “economía pura”, que es la teoría, no del capitalismo realmente existente, sino de una economía imaginaria. Justo como el dogma del fundamentalismo del mercado, en todas partes se adelgaza frente a la realidad, ya no podemos tampoco aceptar la noción popular que hoy se propaga de que la democracia converge con el capitalismo.
Por el contrario, ya estamos con los ojos muy abiertos ante el potencial autoritario latente en el capitalismo. La respuesta del capitalismo al reto presentado por la dialéctica del individuo versus el colectivo (social) contiene, efectivamente, este peligroso potencial.
La contradicción entre el individuo y el colectivo, que es inherente en cualquier sociedad a cualquier nivel de su realidad, fue superada, en todos los sistemas sociales antes de los tiempos modernos, mediante la negación del primer término-esto es, por la domesticación del individuo por la sociedad. El individuo es reconocible sólo, por y a través de su estatus en la familia, el clan, y la sociedad. En la ideología del mundo (capitalista) moderno, los términos de la negación se revierten: la modernidad se declara a sí misma en los derechos de los individuos, aún en oposición a la sociedad.
En mi opinión, esta reversión es solamente una precondición de la liberación, el comienzo de la liberación. Porque al mismo tiempo libera un potencial para la agresividad permanente en las relaciones entre los individuos. La ideología capitalista expresa esta realidad mediante su ética ambigua: larga vida a la competencia, dejemos que sobreviva el más fuerte. El efecto devastador de tal ideología se contiene a veces por la coexistencia de otros principios éticos, la mayoría de orígenes religiosos o heredados de otras formas sociales más tempranas. Pero dejen caer estas represas, y la ideología unilateral de los derechos del individuo -sea en las versiones popularizadas por De Sade o Nietzsche, o en su versión americana-sólo producirá horror empujada hasta sus límites, autocracia y fascismo suave o duro.
Pienso que Marx subestimó este peligro. Quizás al no preocuparse en desarrollar ilusiones que estimularan las adicciones por el pasado, no habría previsto todo el potencial reaccionario de la ideología burguesa del individuo. Dirigió sus preferencias a la sociedad Americana, en el pretexto de que no sufría de los vestigios del pasado feudal que frenaba el progreso en Europa. Quisiera sugerir, por el contrario, que el pasado de la Europa feudal rinde cuentas de algunas características relativamente positivas en su favor. Baste ver el grado de violencia que domina la vida diaria en los EEUU, que está fuera de toda proporción con lo que ocurre en Europa… ¿podría eso atribuirse a la ausencia de antecedentes pre-modernos en los EEUU?
Para ir más lejos, ¿no podríamos atribuir a estos antecedentes -donde existan-un papel positivo en la emergencia de elementos de una ideología pos-capitalista que enfatice valores de generosidad y de solidaridad humana? ¿Su ausencia, no estará reforzando la sumisión al poder dominante de la ideología capitalista? ¿Es mera casualidad que, precisamente, el autoritarismo “blando” (alternándose con fases de autoritarismo duro, como la experiencia del McCartismo podrá hace recordar a todos aquellos que la han borrado de su memoria de la historia reciente) es una de las características permanentes del modelo americano? ¿Es pura casualidad que por esta razón los EEUU provea el modelo de democracia de baja intensidad, al punto que la proporción de gente que se abstiene de votar no se ve en ninguna parte y que —-otro hecho que no es accidental-sean precisamente los desheradados los que quedan al margen de las votaciones en masse?
¿De qué modo una síntesis dialéctica más allá del capitalismo pudiera hacer posible reconciliar los derechos del individuo con los de la colectividad? ¿ De qué modo esta posible reconciliación pudiera dar más trasparencia a la vida individual y a la vida de la sociedad? Estas son preguntas que no intentaremos contestar aquí, pero que definitivamente se proponen solas, y que por supuesto son un reto al concepto burgués de democracia e identifican sus límites históricos.
Si, entonces, no hay convergencia, ni menos una convergencia “natural”, entre el mercado y la democracia, debemos concluir que el desarrollo entendido en su sentido corriente de crecimiento económico acelerado a través de la expansión de los mercados (y hasta ahora ha habido escasamente alguna experiencia de desarrollo de una clase diferente)-¿es compatible con algún grado avanzado de democracia?
No faltan hechos que apoyen esta tesis. Los “éxitos” de Corea, de Taiwán, de Brasil bajo la dictadura militar, y de los populismos nacionalistas en su fase de ascenso (Nasser, Boumadienne, el Irak del Baath, etc.) no se cumplieron por sistemas que tuvieran mucho respeto por la democracia. Más atrás, Alemania y Japón, en la fase en que capturaron el momento, fueron ciertamente menos democráticos que sus rivales británicos o franceses. Los experimentos socialistas modernos, fuero escasamente democráticos, y ocasionalmente registraron altos índices de crecimiento.
Pero por el otro lado, uno pudo observar que la Italia democrática de la posguerra se modernizaba con una rapidez y una profundidad que el fascismo, con toda su fanfarronería, nunca alcanzó, y que la Europa Occidental, con su socialdemocracia avanzada (el estado de bienestar de la posguerra), experimentó el más prodigioso crecimiento en la historia. Uno puede fortalecer la comparación a favor de la democracia enumerando incontables dictaduras que sólo engendraron estancamiento y aún masas devastadoras de dificultades interconectadas.
¿Podríamos entonces adoptar una posición reservada y relativista, rehusar establecer cualquier clase de relación entre el desarrollo y la democracia, y decir que si son compatibles o no, eso dependería de condiciones concretas específicas? Esa actitud es aceptable si nos contentamos con la definición “ordinaria” de desarrollo, identificado con el crecimiento acelerado dentro del sistema. Pero eso ya no es aceptable, si nosotros atendemos a la segunda de las tres proposiciones establecidas al comienzo de este estudio.
Entender que el capitalismo globalizado es por naturaleza polarizador y que ese desenvolvimiento es un concepto crítico, que implica que el desarrollo debe ocurrir dentro del marco de la construcción de una alternativa, la sociedad pos-capitalista. Esa construcción sólo puede ser el producto de la voluntad y de la acción progresiva del pueblo. ¿Hay allí una definición de democracia diferente a lo que está implícito en esa voluntad y en esa acción? Es en este sentido que la democracia es verdaderamente la condición del desarrollo. Pero esta es una proposición que ya no tiene nada que ver con lo que el discurso dominante intenta decir sobre este tema. Nuestra proposición concluye diciendo que en efecto no podrá haber socialismo (si usamos este término para designar una alternativa poscapitalista mejor) sin democracia, pero también que no puede haber progreso en democratización sin una transformación socialista.
El observador “realista” que estaba esperando esto de mí, no perderá tiempo en señalar que la experiencia del socialismo realmente existente alega en contra de la validez de mi tesis. Verdad. La versión popular del marxismo histórico soviético efectivamente decreta que la abolición de la propiedad privada significa derechamente que ha sido reemplazada por la propiedad social. Ni Marx ni Lenin jamás llegaron a tal simplificación.
Para ellos, la abolición de la propiedad privada del capital y de la tierra era sólo el primer acto necesario para iniciar una posible larga evolución hacia la constitución de la propiedad social. La propiedad social llega a ser una realidad sólo desde el momento en que la democratización ha realizado tales poderosos progresos que los ciudadanos-productores han llegado a ser amos de todas las decisiones tomadas a todos los niveles de la vida social, desde el lugar de trabajo a las cumbres del estado.
El más optimista de los seres humanos no podría imaginar que este resultado pudiera alcanzarse en cualquier parte del mundo -se trate de los EEUU, de Francia o del Congo-en “unos pocos años”, como en los pocos años al final de los cuales se proclamó que en algún lugar o en otro se había completado la construcción del socialismo. Ya que la tarea es nada menos que la construcción de una nueva cultura, que requiere de generaciones sucesivas que gradualmente se transforman a si mismas mediante su propia acción.
El lector captará rápidamente que hay una analogía, y no una contradicción, entre 1) el funcionamiento en el capitalismo histórico, de la relación entre el liberalismo utópico y la dirección pragmática, y 2), el funcionamiento en la sociedad soviética, de la relación entre el discurso ideológico socialista y la dirección real. La ideología socialista en cuestión es la bolchevique que, siguiendo la de la socialdemocracia europea anterior a 1914 (y sin tener ninguna quiebra con ella en este punto fundamental), no criticó la convergencia “natural” de las lógicas entre los diferentes dominios de la vida social y dio un “significado” a la historia sobre una interpretación lineal y fácil de su curso “necesario”.
Esa era sin duda una manera de leer el Marxismo histórico, pero no era la única manera de leer a Marx (de todos modos, no es la mía). La convergencia es expresada aquí de la misma manera: vista desde el punto de vista impuesto por el dogma, la dirección de la economía por el Plan (substituido por el mercado) obviamente produce una respuesta apropiada a las necesidades. La Democracia sólo puede reforzar las decisiones del Plan, oponérsele es irracional. Pero aquí el socialismo demasiado imaginativo corre en contra de las demandas de la dirección del socialismo realmente existente, que se enfrenta a problemas reales y serios, entre otros, por ejemplo, desarrollar las fuerzas productivas para “capturar el momento”.
Los poderes en presencia proveen para eso prácticas cínicas que no son ni pueden ser aceptadas. El totalitarismo es común a ambos sistemas y se expresan de la misma manera, mediante la mentira sistemática. Si sus manifestaciones fueron más violentas en la URSS, es porque el retraso que debía superarse era un peso tan grande, mientras el progreso que se realizaba en Occidente tenía confortables cojines en donde descansar ( de ahí el frecuente “totalitarismo light” o blando, como en el caso del consumismo de los períodos de crecimiento fácil).
Abandonar la tesis de la convergencia y aceptar la del conflicto entre las lógicas de los diferentes dominios, es el prerrequisito para interpretar la historia de una manera que potencialmente reconcilie la teoría con la realidad. Pero es también el prerrequisito para diseñar estrategias que hagan posible llevar a cabo acciones efectivas -esto es, realizar progresos en todos los aspectos de la sociedad. La íntima relación entre el desarrollo social real y la democratización, tan cercana que son inseparables, nada tiene que ver con la cháchara sobre el tema ofrecida por los proponentes de la ideología dominante. Su pensamiento es siempre de segunda clase, confuso, ambiguo, y al final, a pesar de lo que a veces sea aparente, reaccionario. Como consecuencia, llega a ser la herramienta perfecta del poder dominante del capital.
La democracia es necesariamente un concepto universalista, y no puede tolerarse ningún lapsus de esa virtud esencial. Pero el discurso dominante -aún ese que emana de fuerzas que subjetivamente se clasifican como “de izquierda”-da una interpretación sesgada de democracia que al final niega la unidad de la especie humana a favor de “razas”, “comunidades”, “grupos culturales”,etc. La política de identidad de los Anglo-Sajones, cuya expresión agregada en el “comunitarismo”, es un ejemplo sobresaliente de esta negación de la igualdad real de los seres humanos. Desear ingenuamente, aún con las mejores intenciones, formas específicas de “desarrollo comunitario”-que serán reclamadas después, es algo que se produjo por voluntad expresada democráticamente, en comunidades (de las Indias Occidentales en los suburbios de Londres, o entre los Nor Africanos en Francia, o entre los negros de los EEUU, etc)-lo que significa encerrar a los individuos dentro de esas comunidades y encerrar esas comunidades dentro de los límites de hierro de las jerarquías que impone el sistema. Es nada menos que un tipo de apartheid que no es reconocido como tal.
El argumento avanzado por los promotores de este modelo de “desarrollo comunitario” pareciera ser a la vez pragmático (“hacer algo por los desposeídos y las víctimas, que se han juntado en estas comunidades”) y democrático (“las comunidades están dispuestas a afirmarse como tales”). Sin duda una gran cantidad de decires universalistas han sido y siguen siendo pura retórica, que no llama a ninguna estrategia por una acción efectiva que cambie el mundo, la que obviamente significaría considerar formas concretas de lucha contra la opresión sufrida por estos grupos particulares. De acuerdo. Pero la opresión en cuestión no puede ser abolida si al mismo tiempo le imponemos un marco dentro del cual se reproducirá a sí misma, aún en formas más suaves.
La vinculación que los miembros de una comunidad oprimida pudieran sentir por su propia cultura de opresión, por mucho que respetemos sus sentimientos en abstracto, es sin embargo el producto de la crisis de la democracia. Es porque la efectividad, la credibilidad, y la legitimidad de la democracia han sido horadadas, que los seres humanos buscan refugio en la ilusión de una identidad particular que los pueda proteger. Entonces nos topamos en la agenda con el culturalismo, esto es, la afirmación de que cada una de estas comunidades (religiosas, étnicas, sexuales, u otras) tiene sus propios valores irreductibles (esto es, valores que no tienen significación universal). El culturalismo, como he dicho antes, no es un complemento de la democracia, una manera de aplicarla concretamente, sino todo lo contrario, una contradicción a ella.
La globalización de las luchas sociales: Condiciones para una reanudación del Desarrollo
Los escenarios del futuro dependen extensamente de nuestra visión sobre las relaciones entre las fuertes tendencias objetivas y las respuestas que los pueblos, y las fuerzas sociales de que están compuestos, den a los retos que representan esas tendencias. Así pues, hay un elemento de subjetividad, de intuición, que no puede eliminarse. Y eso está bien, ya que significa que el futuro no está programado de antemano, y que el producto de la imaginación inventiva, para usar la fuerte expresión de Castoriadis, tiene su lugar en la historia.
Es especialmente difícil hacer predicciones en un período como el nuestro, cuando todos los mecanismos políticos e ideológicos que gobiernan la conducta de los diversos actores han desaparecido. Cuando llegó a su fin el período de la post-Segunda Guerra Mundial, la estructura de la vida política colapsó.
Tradicionalmente las luchas políticas y la vida política se conducían en el contexto de los estados nacionales cuya legitimidad no era cuestionada (la legitimidad de un gobierno podía cuestionarse, pero no la del estado). Detrás y dentro del estado, los partidos políticos, los sindicatos, y unas cuantas grandes instituciones-como las asociaciones nacionales de empleadores y los círculos que los medios llamaban “la clase política”…constituían la estructura básica del sistema en el que los movimientos políticos, las luchas de clases y las corrientes ideológicas venían a expresarse.
Pero ahora nos encontramos con que casi en todos los lugares del mundo estas instituciones han perdido en un grado u otro gran parte, sino toda, su legitimidad. La gente “ya no cree en ellas”. Así, en su lugar, han surgido “movimientos” de diversa suerte, movimientos centrados en las demandas de los Verdes, o movimientos de las mujeres, movimientos por la democracia o la justicia social, y movimientos de grupos que afirman su identidad como comunidades étnicas o religiosas. Esta nueva vida política es por eso altamente inestable.
Valdría la pena discutir concretamente la relación entre esas demandas y movimientos y la crítica radical de la sociedad (esto es, del capitalismo realmente existente) y de la dirección neoliberal globalizada. Ya que algunos de estos movimientos se juntan -o pueden juntarse-en el rechazo consciente de la sociedad proyectada por los poderes dominantes, otros, al contrario, no se interesan en esto y no hacen nada por oponerse a eso. Algunos movimientos son manipulados y apoyados (por los poderes dominantes, tr.), abierta o encubiertamente, a otros los combaten resueltamente -esa es la regla en la nueva y aún no bien establecida vida política.
Hay una estrategia política global para el gobierno mundial. El objetivo de esta estrategia es producir la más grande fragmentación posible de fuerzas potencialmente hostiles al sistema, apadrinando la atomización de las formas estatales de organización de la sociedad. ¡Que haya tantas y tantos Eslovenias, Chechenias, Kosovos y Kuwaits como sea posible! En conexión con esto, se da la bienvenida la posibilidad de manipular demandas basadas en las identidades separadas. La cuestión de la identidad de la comunidad-étnica, religiosa, o de cualquier otra clase-es por eso uno de los problemas centrales de nuestro tiempo.
El principio democrático básico, que implica el respeto real por la diversidad (nacional, étnica, religiosa, cultural e ideológica), no puede tolerar ninguna excepción. La única manera de sostener la diversidad es mediante la práctica de una genuina democracia. Fallando esto, llega a ser inevitablemente un instrumento que el adversario puede usar (menos a menudo ella) para sus propios fines .Pero a este respecto las diversas izquierdas en la historia a menudo han estado faltando. No siempre, por supuesto, y mucho menos de lo que con frecuencia se dice. Un ejemplo entre otros: la Yugoslavia de Tito fue casi un modelo de coexistencia de nacionalidades, sobre una base de igualdad, pero no ciertamente Rumania!
En el Tercer Mundo del período de Bandung, los movimientos de liberación nacional a menudo se las arreglaron para unir a diferentes grupos étnicos y comunidades religiosas contra el enemigo imperialista. Muchas clases dirigentes en la primera generación de los estados africanos, eran realmente trans-étnicas. Pero pocos poderes fueron capaces de administrar la diversidad democráticamente o, cuando se ganaba con ello, de mantenerla. Su débil inclinación por la democracia produjo resultados deplorables tanto en este dominio como en la administración de otros problemas de sus sociedades. Cuando llegó la crisis, las clases dirigentes muy presionadas, y sin poderes para confrontarlos, hasta llegaron a jugar un rol decisivo en el recurso de alguna comunidad étnica particular para separarse, lo que fue usado como un medio para prolongar su “control” de masas. Aún en muchas auténticas democracias burguesas, la diversidad entre las comunidades está lejos de haber sido administrada correctamente. Irlanda del Norte es un claro ejemplo.
El culturalismo ha sido exitoso en la medida en que ha fallado la administración democrática de la diversidad. Por culturalismo quiero significar la afirmación de que las diferencias en cuestión son “primordiales”, que debe dárseles a éstas “prioridad” (sobre las diferencias de clase, por ejemplo), e incluso que estas diferencias son “Transhistóricas”, esto es, basadas en invariables históricas. (Esto último es a menudo el caso con los culturalismos religiosos, que fácilmente se deslizan hacia el oscurantismo y el fanatismo).
Para salir de este atolladero de las demandas basadas en la identidad, propondría lo que pienso es un criterio esencial. Esos movimientos cuyas demandas están conectadas con la lucha contra la explotación y por una más amplia democracia en cualquier dominio, son progresivos. Por el contrario, esos que se presentan a sí mismos, como carentes de un “programa social” (ya que suponen que eso no es importante!)- que se declaran “no hostiles a la globalización” (porque eso tampoco es importante!)-a fortiori esos que se declaran ajenos al concepto de democracia (que acusan de ser un invento Occidental)-son abiertamente reaccionarios y sirven los fines del capital dominante a la perfección. El capital dominante sabe esto, y al caso, apoya sus demandas ( aún cuando la media saca ventajas de su bárbaro contenido para denunciar a los pueblos que son sus víctimas!), usando y manipulando estos movimientos.
La democracia y los derechos de los pueblos, que invocan hoy los mismos representantes del capital dominante, escasamente pueden concebirse salvo como medios políticos de la dirección neoliberal en la crisis contemporánea mundial, como un complemento a los medios económicos. La democracia en cuestión depende de los casos. Lo mismo es verdad con respecto al “buen gobierno”, del que también hablan. En adición, porque esto queda enteramente al servicio de las prioridades que imponen las estrategias de EEUU/Tríada, y entonces es también cínicamente usado como instrumento.
De ahí la extensa aplicación del doble estándar. Por ejemplo, nada de intervenciones a favor de la democracia en Afganistán o en los países del Golfo Pérsico, así como no se metieron ayer en los caminos de Mobutu, u hoy, en los de Sabimbi, y de muchos otros, mañana. En algunos casos, los derechos de los pueblos son sagrados ( hoy en Kosovo, mañana en Tibet), y en otros casos son olvidados ( en Palestina, el Kurdistán, Chipre, los Serbios de Krajina ,a los que los croatas expulsaron por la fuerza, etc.) Incluso el terrible genocidio de Rwanda no ocasionó ninguna investigación seria sobre la parte de responsabilidad de los estados que dieron su apoyo diplomático a los gobiernos que lo prepararon abiertamente. Sin duda la abominable conducta de ciertos regímenes facilita la tarea al proveer pretextos que son fáciles de explotar. Pero el silencio cómplice en otros casos le quita toda credibilidad a estos discursos sobre la democracia y los derechos de los pueblos. Uno no puede menos que cumplir con los requerimientos de la lucha por la democracia y el respeto de los pueblos, sin los cuales no hay progreso.
Este es afortunadamente el caso, en esta nueva fase que estamos presenciando de ascenso de las luchas en que está envuelto el pueblo trabajador víctima del sistema. Los campesinos sin tierra en Brasil; asalariados y desempleados, en algunos países de Europa; sindicatos que incluyen a la gran mayoría de los que perciben un salario (en Corea del Sur o en Sud África) ; jóvenes y estudiantes que traen consigo a las clases trabajadoras urbanas (como en Indonesia) -y la lista crece cada día.
Estas luchas sociales están destinadas a expandirse. Serán seguramente muy pluralistas, lo que es una de las características positivas de nuestro tiempo. Sin duda este pluralismo surge de los resultados acumulados de los llamados “nuevos movimientos sociales”-los movimientos feministas, los movimientos ecologistas, los movimientos democráticos. Por supuesto, tendrán que enfrentar diferentes obstáculos a su desarrollo, dependiendo del tiempo y del lugar.
El problema central aquí es cuál es la relación que se dará entre los conflictos dominantes, por lo que quiero decir los conflictos globales entre diversas clases dominantes -esto es, los estados-cuya posible geometría he tratado de delinear más arriba. ¿Quién vencerá? ¿Las luchas sociales estarán subordinadas, contenidas en el más amplio contexto imperial-global de los conflictos, y por ello, serán controladas por los poderes dominantes, movilizadas para sus propósitos si es que no simplemente manipuladas? ¿O, por el contrario, las luchas sociales ganarán autonomía y forzarán a los poderes a adaptarse a sus demandas?

Samir Amin es director de la Oficina Africana (con sede en Dakkar, Senegal) del Tercer Foro Mundial, una asociación no gubernamental internacional para la investigación y el debate. Es autor de numerosos libros y artículos, incluyendo Spectres of Capitalism, recientemente publicado por Monthly Review Press, 1998).

The English empire
A growing number of firms worldwide are adopting English as their official language
Feb 15th 2014

YANG YUANQING, Lenovo’s boss, hardly spoke a word of English until he was about 40: he grew up in rural poverty and read engineering at university. But when Lenovo bought IBM’s personal-computer division in 2005 he decided to immerse himself in English: he moved his family to North Carolina, hired a language tutor and—the ultimate sacrifice—spent hours watching cable-TV news. This week he was in São Paulo, Brazil, for a board meeting and an earnings call: he conducted all his business in English except for a briefing for the Chinese press.

Lenovo is one of a growing number of multinationals from the non-Anglophone world that have made English their official language. The fashion began in places with small populations but global ambitions such as Singapore (which retained English as its lingua franca when it left the British empire in 1963), the Nordic countries and Switzerland. Goran Lindahl, a former boss of ABB, a Swiss-Swedish engineering giant, once described its official language as “poor English”. The practice spread to the big European countries: numerous German and French multinationals now use English in board meetings and official documents.
In this section

Anything you can do, Icahn do better
Fever rising
On a wing and a prayer
Driven away
TV star
Sunstroke
No profits, we promise
The English empire

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Audi may use a German phrase—Vorsprung durch Technik, or progress through engineering—in its advertisements, but it is impossible to progress through its management ranks without good English. When Christoph Franz became boss of Lufthansa in 2011 he made English its official language even though all but a handful of the airline’s 50 most senior managers were German.

The Académie française may be prickly about the advance of English. But there is no real alternative as a global business language. The most plausible contender, Mandarin Chinese, is one of the world’s most difficult to master, and least computer-friendly. It is not even universal in China: more than 400m people there do not speak it.

Corporate English is now invading more difficult territory, such as Japan. Rakuten, a cross between Amazon and eBay, and Fast Retailing, which operates the Uniqlo fashion chain, were among the first to switch. Now they are being joined by old-economy companies such as Honda, a carmaker, and Bridgestone, a tyremaker. Chinese firms are proving harder to crack: they have a huge internal market and are struggling to recruit competent managers of any description, let alone English-speakers. But some are following Lenovo’s lead. Huawei has introduced English as a second language and encourages high-flyers to become fluent. Around 300m Chinese are taking English lessons.

There are some obvious reasons why multinational companies want a lingua franca. Adopting English makes it easier to recruit global stars (including board members), reach global markets, assemble global production teams and integrate foreign acquisitions. Such steps are especially important to companies in Japan, where the population is shrinking.

There are less obvious reasons too. Rakuten’s boss, Hiroshi Mikitani, argues that English promotes free thinking because it is free from the status distinctions which characterise Japanese and other Asian languages. Antonella Mei-Pochtler of the Boston Consulting Group notes that German firms get through their business much faster in English than in laborious German. English can provide a neutral language in a merger: when Germany’s Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc combined in 1999 to create Aventis, they decided it would be run in English, in part to avoid choosing between their respective languages.

Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School says that “Englishnisation”, a word she borrows from Mr Mikitani, can stir up a hornet’s nest of emotions. Slow learners lose their self-confidence, worry about their job security, clam up in meetings or join a guerrilla resistance that conspires in its native language. Cliques of the fluent and the non-fluent can develop. So can lawsuits: in 2004 workers at a French subsidiary of GE took it to court for requiring them to read internal documents in English; the firm received a hefty fine. In all, a policy designed to bring employees together can all too easily have the opposite effect.

Ms Neeley argues that companies must think carefully about implementing a policy that touches on so many emotions. Senior managers should explain to employees why switching to English is so important, provide them with classes and conversation groups, and offer them incentives to improve their fluency, such as foreign postings. Those who are already proficient in English should speak more slowly and refrain from dominating conversations. And managers must act as referees and enforcers, resolving conflicts and discouraging staff from reverting to their native tongues. Mr Mikitani, who was a fluent English speaker himself, at first told his employees to pay for their own lessons and gave them two years to become fluent, on pain of demotion or even dismissal. He later realised that he had been too harsh, and started providing lessons on company time.

Nuance and emotion, or waffle?

Intergovernmental bodies like the European Union, which employs a babbling army of translators costing $1.5 billion a year, are obliged to pretend that there is no predominant global tongue. But businesses worldwide are facing up to the reality that English is the language on which the sun never sets. Still, Englishnisation is not easy, even if handled well: the most proficient speakers can still struggle to express nuance and emotion in a foreign tongue. For this reason, native English speakers often assume that the spread of their language in global corporate life confers an automatic advantage on them. In fact it can easily encourage them to rest on their laurels. Too many of them (especially Englishmen, your columnist keeps being told) risk mistaking their fluency in meetings for actual accomplishments.

Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter

The Empire Writes Back

‘. . . the Empire writes back to the Centre . . .’ Salman Rushdie

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture.

The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a
wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up the debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions
of literature and language.

This book is indispensable not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility to readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, it is impossible to underestimate the importance of this book for contemporary post-colonial studies.

Bill Ashcroft teaches at the University of New South Wales, Australia,
Gareth Griffiths at the University of Albany, USA and Helen Tiffin at the University of Queensland, Australia. All three have published widely in post-colonial studies, and together edited the ground-breaking Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1994) and wrote Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998).

IN THE SAME SERIES
Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis
Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 ed. Terence Hawkes
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice Christopher Norris
Dialogue and Difference: English for the Nineties ed. Peter Brooker
and Peter Humm
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literature Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion Rosemary Jackson
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World Michael Holquist
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism ed. Gayle Green and
Coppélia Kahn
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
Patricia Waugh
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word Walter J. Ong
The Politics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon
Post-Colonial Shakespeares ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Toril Moi
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes
Studying British Cultures: An Introduction ed. Susan Bassnett
Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige
Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction
Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires
Translation Studies Susan Bassnett
Bill Ashcroft
Gareth Griffiths
Helen Tiffin
The Empire Writes Back
Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures
2nd edition
London and New York
First published 1989 by Routledge

CONTENTS

General editor’s preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
What are post-colonial literatures? 1
Post-colonial literatures and English Studies 2
Development of post-colonial literatures 4
Hegemony 6
Language 7
Place and displacement 8
Post-coloniality and theory 11
1 Cutting the ground: critical models of post-colonial
literatures 14
National and regional models 15
Comparisons between two or more regions 17
The ‘Black writing’ model 19
Wider comparative models 22
Models of hybridity and syncreticity 32
2 Re-placing language: textual strategies in postcolonial
writing 37
Abrogation and appropriation 37
Language and abrogation 40
A post-colonial linguistic theory: the Creole continuum 43
The metonymic function of language variance 50
Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing 58
3 Re-placing the text: the liberation of post-colonial writing 77
The imperial moment: control of the means of communication 78
Colonialism and silence: Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds 82
Colonialism and ‘authenticity’: V.S. Naipaul’s The
Mimic Men 87
Abrogating ‘authenticity’: Michael Anthony’s ‘Sandra Street’ 90
Radical Otherness and hybridity: Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage 96
Appropriating marginality: Janet Frame’s The Edge of
the Alphabet 102
Appropriating the frame of power: R.K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets 108
4 Theory at the crossroads: indigenous theory and post-colonial reading 115
Indian literary theories 116
African literary theories 122
The settler colonies 131
Caribbean theories 144
5 Re-placing theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory 153
Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism 153
Post-colonial reconstructions: literature, meaning, value 178
Post-colonialism as a reading strategy 186
6 Re-thinking the post-colonial: post-colonialism in the twenty first century 193
Who is post-colonial? 200
Theoretical issues 203
Post-colonial futures 209
Conclusion More english than English 220
Readers’ guide 223
Notes 238
Bibliography 246
Index 271

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editor’s Preface to New Accents seems hard to
justify. What is there left to say? Twenty-five years ago, the series began
with a very clear purpose. Its major concern was the newly perplexed
world of academic literary studies, where hectic monsters called ‘Theory’,
‘Linguistics’ and ‘Politics’ ranged. In particular, it aimed itself at
those undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who were
either learning to come to terms with the new developments or were
being sternly warned against them.

New Accents deliberately took sides. Thus the first Preface spoke darkly,
in 1977, of ‘a time of rapid and radical social change’, of the ‘erosion
of the assumptions and presuppositions’ central to the study of literature.
‘Modes and categories inherited from the past’ it announced, ‘no
longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation’. The
aim of each volume would be to ‘encourage rather than resist the
process of change’ by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of new
ideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual developments.

If mystification (or downright demonization) was the
enemy, lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stake
there) became a friend. If a ‘distinctive discourse of the future’
beckoned, we wanted at least to be able to understand it.

With the apocalypse duly noted, the second Preface proceeded
piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might stagger
portentously from the rubble. ‘How can we recognise or deal with the
new?’, it complained, reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance of
‘a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring
names’ and promising a programme of wary surveillance at ‘the
boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable’.
Its conclusion, ‘the unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our
thoughts’ may rank as a truism. But in so far as it offered some sort of
useable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties, it is not to be
blushed for.

In the circumstances, any subsequent, and surely final, effort can
only modestly look back, marvelling that the series is still here, and not
unreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outlet
for what turned, over the years, into some of the distinctive voices and
topics in literary studies. But the volumes now re-presented have more
than a mere historical interest. As their authors indicate, the issues they
raised are still potent, the arguments with which they engaged are still
disturbing. In short, we weren’t wrong. Academic study did change
rapidly and radically to match, even to help to generate, wide reaching
social changes. A new set of discourses was developed to negotiate
those upheavals. Nor has the process ceased. In our deliquescent world,
what was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those years
ago now seems regularly to come to pass.

Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning of,
maps for, guides to, or nudges in the direction of this new terrain is
scarcely for me to say. Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivating
the sense that it was there. The only justification for a reluctant third
attempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is.

TERENCE HAWKES
general editor’s preface

INTRODUCTION

More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism. It is easy to see how important this has been in the political and economic spheres, but its general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporary peoples is often less evident. Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writing, and through other arts such as painting, sculpture, music, and dance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.
WHAT ARE POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES?

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized
by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers, such as France, Portugal, and Spain. The semantic basis of the term ‘postcolonial’ might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the imperial power. It has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence (‘colonial period’ and ‘post-colonial period’), for example, in constructing national literary histories, or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in those
histories. Generally speaking, though, the term ‘colonial’ has been used for the period before independence and a term indicating a national writing, such as ‘modern Canadian writing’ or ‘recent West Indian literature’ has been employed to distinguish the period after independence.

We use the term ‘post-colonial’, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted. In this sense this book is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this on contemporary literatures.

So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada,
Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan,
Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all postcolonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in
this category.

Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for postcolonial literatures everywhere. What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial.

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND ENGLISH STUDIES

The study of English has always been a densely political and cultural
phenomenon, a practice in which language and literature have both been called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism.

The development of English as a privileged academic subject in nineteenth-century Britain – finally confirmed by its inclusion in the syllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge, and re-affirmed in the 1921 Newbolt Report – came about as part of an attempt to replace the Classics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-century humanistic studies.

From the beginning, proponents of English as a discipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics, with its emphasis on scholarship, philology, and historical study – the fixing of texts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants of a single, unified, and agreed meaning.

The historical moment which saw the emergence of ‘English’ as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism (Batsleer et al. 1985: 14, 19–25). Gauri Viswanathan has presented strong arguments for relating the ‘institutionalisation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] a shape and an ideological content developed in the colonial context’, and specifically as it developed in India, where: British colonial administrators, provoked by missionaries on the one hand and fears of native insubordination on the other, discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education.
(Viswanathan 1987: 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, both at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and at the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values (e.g. civilization, humanity, etc.) which, conversely, established ‘savagery’, ‘native’, ‘primitive’, as their antitheses and as the object of a reforming zeal.1

A ‘privileging norm’ was enthroned at the heart of the formation of
English Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the ‘peripheral’,
the ‘marginal’, the ‘uncanonized’. Literature was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. So when elements of the periphery and margin threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidly incorporated. This was a process, in Edward Said’s terms, of conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984), that is, a mimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be accepted but to be adopted and absorbed. It caused those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become ‘more English than the English’. We see examples of this in such writers as Henry James and T.S. Eliot.

As post-colonial societies sought to establish their difference from
Britain, the response of those who recognized this complicity between
language, education, and cultural incorporation was to break the link
between language and literary study by dividing ‘English’ departments
in universities into separate schools of Linguistics and of Literature,
both of which tended to view their project within a national or international
context.

Ngugi’s essay ‘On the abolition of the English department’ (Ngugi 1972) is an illuminating account of the particular arguments involved in Africa. John Docker’s essay, ‘The neocolonial assumption in the university teaching of English’ (Tiffin 1978: 26–31), addresses similar problems in the settler colony context, describing a situation in which, in contrast to Kenya, little genuine
decolonization is yet in sight.

As Docker’s critique makes clear, in most post-colonial nations (including the West Indies and India) the nexus of power involving literature, language, and a dominant British culture has strongly resisted attempts to dismantle it. Even after such attempts began to succeed, the canonical nature and unquestioned status of the works of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporated remained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institutions of education and literature.

Nevertheless, the development of the post-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of the assumptions on which the study of ‘English’ was based.

DEVELOPMENT OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES

Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can be
seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness
and of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centre.

During the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial centre is inevitably, of course, produced by a literate elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power. Thus the first texts produced in the colonies in the new language are frequently produced by ‘representatives’ of the imperial power; for example, gentrified settlers(Wentworth’s ‘Australia’), travellers and sightseers (Froude’s Oceana, and his The English in the West Indies, or the travel diaries of Mary Kingsley), or the Anglo-Indian and West African administrators, soldiers,
and ‘boxwallahs’, and, even more frequently, their memsahibs (volumes of memoirs).

Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can
they be integrated in any way with the culture which already exists in
the countries invaded. Despite their detailed reportage of landscape,
custom, and language, they inevitably privilege the centre, emphasizing
the ‘home’ over the ‘native’, the ‘metropolitan’ over the ‘provincial’
or ‘colonial’, and so forth. At a deeper level their claim to objectivity
simply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they are
created. That this is true of even the consciously literary works which
emerge from this moment can be illustrated by the poems and stories
of Rudyard Kipling. For example, in the well-known poem ‘Christmas
in India’ the evocative description of a Christmas day in the heat of
India is contextualized by invoking its absent English counterpart.
Apparently it is only through this absent and enabling signifier that the
Indian daily reality can acquire legitimacy as a subject of literary
discourse.

The second stage of production within the evolving discourse of the
post-colonial is the literature produced ‘under imperial licence’ by
‘natives’ or ‘outcasts’, for instance the large body of poetry and prose
produced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indian
upper class, or African ‘missionary literature’ (e.g. Thomas Mofolo’s
Chaka). The producers signify by the very fact of writing in the language of the dominant culture that they have temporarily or permanently entered a specific and privileged class endowed with the language, education, and leisure necessary to produce such works. The Australian novel Ralph Rashleigh, now known to have been written by the convict James Tucker, is a case in point. Tucker, an educated man, wrote Rashleigh as a ‘special’ (a privileged convict) whilst working at the penal settlement at Port Macquarie as storekeeper to the superintendent.

Written on government paper with government ink and pens, the
novel was clearly produced with the aid and support of the superintendent.
Tucker had momentarily gained access to the privilege of
literature. Significantly, the moment of privilege did not last and he
died in poverty at the age of fifty-eight at Liverpool asylum in Sydney.
It is characteristic of these early post-colonial texts that the potential
for subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized. Although they
deal with such powerful material as the brutality of the convict system
(Tucker’s Rashleigh), the historical potency of the supplanted and
denigrated native cultures (Mofolo’s Chaka), or the existence of a rich
cultural heritage older and more extensive than that of Europe (any of
many nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poets, such as Ram Sharma)
they are prevented from fully exploring their anti-imperial potential.

Both the available discourse and the material conditions of production
for literature in these early post-colonial societies restrain this possibility.
The institution of ‘Literature’ in the colony is under the direct
control of the imperial ruling class who alone license the acceptable
form and permit the publication and distribution of the resulting work.

So, texts of this kind come into being within the constraints of a
discourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system which
limits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective. The
development of independent literatures depended upon the abrogation
of this constraining power and the appropriation of language and writing
for new and distinctive usages. Such an appropriation is clearly the
most significant feature in the emergence of modern post-colonial
literatures (see chs 2 and 3).

HEGEMONY

Why should post-colonial societies continue to engage with the imperial experience? Since all the post-colonial societies we discuss have achieved political independence, why is the issue of coloniality still relevant at all? This question of why the empire needs to write back to a centre once the imperial structure has been dismantled in political terms is an important one.

Britain, like the other dominant colonial powers of the nineteenth century, has been relegated to a relatively minor place in international affairs. In the spheres of politics and economics, and increasingly in the vital new area of the mass media, Britain and the other European imperial powers have been superseded by the emergent power of the USA. Nevertheless, through the
literary canon, the body of British texts which all too frequently still acts as a touchstone of taste and value, and through RS-English (Received Standard English), which asserts the English of south-east England as a universal norm, the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial world.

This cultural hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity, and through attitudes to postcolonial literatures which identify them as isolated national off-shoots of English literature, and which therefore relegate them to marginal and subordinate positions. More recently, as the range and strength of these literatures has become undeniable, a process of incorporation has begun in which, employing Eurocentric standards of judgement, the centre has sought to claim those works and writers of which it approves as British.2 In all these respects the parallel between the situation of post-colonial writing and that of feminist writing is striking (see ch. 5).

LANGUAGE

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language.
The imperial education system installs a ‘standard’ version of
the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’
as impurities. As a character in Mrs Campbell Praed’s nineteenthcentury
Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it, ‘To be colonial is to talk
Australian slang; to be . . . everything that is abominable’ (Campbell
Praed 1881:154).
Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-colonial voice. For this reason, the discussion of post-colonial writing which follows is largely a discussion of the process by which the language, with its power, and the writing, with its signification of authority, has been wrested from the dominant European culture.

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English language has been used in these societies, and to indicate their own sense of difference, we distinguish in this account between the ‘standard’ British English inherited from the empire and the english which the language has become in post-colonial countries.

Though British imperialism resulted in the spread of a language, English, across the globe, the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians, Maoris, or Kenyans. We need to distinguish between what is proposed as a
standard code, English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre), and the linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world.

For this reason the distinction between English and english will be used
throughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which the
language has been employed by different linguistic communities in the
post-colonial world.3

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum exists between the various linguistic practices which constitute english usage in the modern world. Although linguistically the links between English and the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen as unbroken, the political reality is that English sets itself apart from all other ‘lesser’ variants and so demands to be interrogated about its claim to this special status.

In practice the history of this distinction between English and english
has been between the claims of a powerful ‘centre’ and a multitude
of intersecting usages designated as ‘peripheries’. The language of
these ‘peripheries’ was shaped by an oppressive discourse of power. Yet
they have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovative
literatures of the modern period and this has, at least in part, been the
result of the energies uncovered by the political tension between the
idea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages.

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place
and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity
comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery
of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. Indeed,
critics such as D. E. S. Maxwell have made this the defining model of
post-coloniality (see ch. 1).

A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or ‘voluntary’ removal for indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model. The dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societies whether these have been created by a process of settlement, intervention, or a mixture of the two. Beyond their historical and cultural differences, place, displacement, and a pervasive concern with the myths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to all post-colonial literatures in english.

The alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image which this displacement
produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadian ‘free settlers’ as of Australian convicts, Fijian–Indian or Trinidadian– Indian indentured labourers, West Indian slaves, or forcibly colonized Nigerians or Bengalis. Although this is pragmatically demonstrable from a wide range of texts, it is difficult to account for by theories which see this social and linguistic alienation as resulting only from overtly oppressive forms of colonization such as slavery or conquest.

An adequate account of this practice must go beyond the usual categories of social alienation such as master/slave; free/bonded; ruler/ruled,
however important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cultures.
After all, why should the free settler, formally unconstrained, and
theoretically free to continue in the possession and practice of
‘Englishness’, also show clear signs of alienation even within the
first generation of settlement, and manifest a tendency to seek an
alternative, differentiated identity?

The most widely shared discursive practice within which this alienation
can be identified is the construction of ‘place’. The gap which opens between the experience of place and the language available to
describe it forms a classic and all pervasive feature of post-colonial texts.
This gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describe
a new place, for those whose language is systematically destroyed by
enslavement, and for those whose language has been rendered
unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power.

Some admixture of one or other of these models can describe the
situation of all post-colonial societies. In each case a condition of alienation
is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced or appropriated as english.

That imperialism results in a profound linguistic alienation is obviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is suppressed by military conquest or enslavement. So, for example, an Indian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian writer such as Chinua Achebe have needed to transform the language, to use it in a different way in its new context and so, as Achebe says, quoting James Baldwin, make it ‘bear the burden’ of their experience (Achebe 1975: 62). Although Rao and Achebe write from their own place and so have not suffered a literal geographical displacement, they have to
overcome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacement
of the pre-colonial language by English.

This process occurs within a more comprehensive discourse of place and displacement in the wider post-colonial context. Such alienation is shared by those whose possession of English is indisputably ‘native’ (in the sense of being possessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within its practice once its vocabulary, categories, and codes are felt to be inadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna, the physical and
geographical conditions, or the cultural practices they have developed
in a new land. The Canadian poet Joseph Howe, for instance, plucks
his picture of a moose from some repository of English nursery
rhyme romanticism:
. . . the gay moose in jocund gambol springs,
Cropping the foliage Nature round him flings.
(Howe 1874: 100)
Such absurdities demonstrate the pressing need these native speakers
share with those colonized peoples who were directly oppressed to
escape from the inadequacies and imperial constraints of English as a
social practice. They need, that is, to escape from the implicit body of
assumptions to which English was attached, its aesthetic and social
values, the formal and historically limited constraints of genre, and the
oppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominance,
of centre over margin (Ngugi 1986).

This is not to say that the English language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonial experience, but that it needs to develop an ‘appropriate’ usage in order to do so (by becoming a distinct and unique form of english). The energizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate and subvert the imperial cultural formations.

The pressure to develop such a usage manifests itself early in the development of ‘english’ literatures. It is therefore arguable that, even before the development of a conscious de-colonizing stance, the experience of a new place, identifiably different in its physical characteristics, constrains, for instance, the new settlers to demand a language which will allow them to express their sense of ‘Otherness’. Landscape, flora and fauna, seasons, climatic conditions are formally distinguished from the place of origin as home/colony, Europe/New World, Europe/Antipodes, metropolitan/provincial, and so on, although, of course, at this stage no effective models exist for expressing this sense of Otherness in a positive and creative way.

POST-COLONIALITY AND THEORY

The idea of ‘post-colonial literary theory’ emerges from the inability of
European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied
cultural provenance of post-colonial writing. European theories themselves
emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of ‘the universal’.

Theories of style and genre, assumptions about the universal features of language, epistemologies and value systems are all radically questioned by the practices of postcolonial writing. Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need to address this different practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions as well as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features shared across those traditions.

The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprise
was a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the European
world and the systems of representation which this privileged. Nineteenth-century imperial expansion, the culmination of the outward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyond Europe, which began during the early Renaissance, was underpinned in complex ways by these assumptions.

In the first instance this produced practices of cultural subservience, characterized by one postcolonial critic as ‘cultural cringe’ (Phillips 1958). Subsequently, the emergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to this formed an important element in the development of specific national and regional consciousnesses (see ch. 4).

Paradoxically, however, imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power. In pushing
the colonial world to the margins of experience the ‘centre’ pushed
consciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheres
of thought could be accepted without question. In other words the
alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial
world to the ‘margin’ turned upon itself and acted to push that world
through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all
experience could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious.

Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative
energy. The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has always
been present in the history of European thought and has reached its
latest development in post-structuralism. But the situation of marginalized
societies and cultures enabled them to come to this position much earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b). These notions are implicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the present day.

The task of this book is twofold: first, to identify the range and
nature of these post-colonial texts, and, second, to describe the various
theories which have emerged so far to account for them. So in the first
chapter we consider the development of descriptive models of postcolonial
writing. Since it is not possible to read post-colonial texts without coming to terms with the ways in which they appropriate and deploy the material of linguistic culture, in the second chapter we outline the process by which language is captured to form a distinctive discursive practice. In the third chapter we demonstrate, through symptomatic readings of texts, how post-colonial writing interacts with the social and material practices of colonialism.

One of the major purposes of this book is to explain the nature of existing post-colonial theory and the way in which it interacts with, and dismantles, some of the assumptions of European theory. In the fourth chapter we discuss
the issues in the development of indigenous post-colonial theories, and in the fifth we examine the larger implications of post-coloniality for theories of language, for literary theory, and for social and political analysis in general.

1 CUTTING THE GROUND

Critical models of post-colonial literatures

As writers and critics became aware of the special character of post-colonial texts, they saw the need to develop an adequate model to account for them. Four major models have emerged to date: first, ‘national’ or regional models, which emphasize the distinctive features of the particular national or regional culture; second, race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures, such as the common racial inheritance in literatures of the African diaspora addressed by the ‘Black writing’ model; third, comparative models of varying complexity which seek to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across
two or more post-colonial literatures; fourth, more comprehensive comparative models which argue for features such as hybridity and
syncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures
(syncretism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories,
and, by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form). These models often operate as assumptions within critical practice rather than specific and discrete schools of thought; in any discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operating at the same time.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MODELS

The first post-colonial society to develop a ‘national’ literature was the
USA. The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the late
eighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationship
between literature and place, between literature and nationality, and
particularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms. Ideas about
new kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression to
nationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potent
areas in which to express difference from Britain.

Writers like Charles Brockden Brown, who attempted to indigenize British forms like the gothic and the sentimental novel, soon realized that with the change in location and culture it was not possible to import form and concept
without radical alteration (Fiedler 1960; Ringe 1966).

In many ways the American experience and its attempts to produce a new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all later post-colonial writing.1 The first thing it showed was that some of a post-colonial country’s most deeply held linguistic and cultural traits depend upon its relationship with the colonizing power, particularly the defining contrast between European metropolis and ‘frontier’ (see Fussell 1965).

Once the American Revolution had forced the question of separate nationality, and the economic and political successes of the emerging nation had begun to be taken for granted, American literature as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted. But it was accepted as an offshoot of the ‘parent tree’. Such organic metaphors, and others like ‘parent–child’ and ‘stream–tributary’ acted to keep the new literature in its place. The plant and parent metaphors stressed age, experience, roots, tradition, and, most importantly, the connection between antiquity and value. They implied the same distinctions as those existing between metropolis and frontier: parents are more experienced, more important, more substantial, less brash than their
offspring. Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the final
authority in questions of taste and value.

But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be considered independently, the concept of national literary differences ‘within’ English writing became established. The eventual consequence of this has been that ‘newer’ literatures from countries such as Nigeria, Australia, and India could also be discussed as discrete national formations rather than as ‘branches of the tree’. Their literatures could be considered in relation to the social and political history of each country, and could be read as a source of important images of national identity.

The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamental
to the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies. Without such developments
at the national level, and without the comparative studies between national traditions to which these lead, no discourse of the post-colonial could have emerged. Nor is it simply a matter of development from one stage to another, since all post-colonial studies continue to depend upon national literatures and criticism. The study of national traditions is the first and most vital stage of the process of rejecting the claims of the centre to exclusivity. It is the beginning of what Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has characterized as the ‘process of self-apprehension’ (Soyinka 1976: xi).

Recent theories of a general post-colonial discourse question essentialist formulations which may lead to nationalist and racist orthodoxies, but they do not deny the great importance of maintaining each literature’s sense of specific difference.

It is this sense of difference which constitutes each national literature’s mode of self-apprehension and its claim to be a selfconstituting entity. However, nationalism, in which some partial truth or cliché is elevated to orthodoxy, is a danger implicit in such national conceptions of literary production. The impetus towards national selfrealization in critical assessments of literature all too often fails to stop short of nationalist myth.

Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of language,
nationality, or race to generate the concept of a regional literature, such
as West Indian or South Pacific literature, may also share some of the
limitations of the national model. While the idea of an ‘African’ literature,
for instance, has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in the various African countries, it has only limited application as a descriptive label. African and European critics have produced several regional and national studies which reflect the widespread political, economic, and cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr and Calder 1974; Lindfors 1975; Taiwo 1976; Ogungbesan 1979).

Clearly some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptance in the regions themselves than are others, and will derive from a collective
identity evident in other ways. This is true of the West Indies. Although the Federation of the West Indies failed, the english-speaking countries there still field a regional cricket team. Both the West Indies and the South Pacific have regional universities with a significant input into literary production and discussion. ‘West Indian’ literature has almost always been considered regionally, rather than nationally.

There have been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures as
discrete traditions. A different regional grouping, emphasizing geographical
and historical determinants rather than linguistic ones, has also developed to explore ‘Caribbean’ literature, setting literature in english from the region alongside that written in spanish, french, and other European languages (Allis 1982).

Despite such variants on the national model, most of the english
literatures outside Britain have been considered as individual, national
enterprises forming and reflecting each country’s culture. The inevitable
consequence of this is a gradual blurring of the distinction between the national and the nationalist. Nationalism has usually included a healthy repudiation of British and US hegemony observable in publishing, education, and the public sponsorship of writing. Yet all too often nationalist criticism, by failing to alter the terms of the discourse within which it operates, has participated implicitly or even explicitly in a discourse ultimately controlled by the very imperial power its nationalist assertion is designed to exclude.
Emphasis may have been transferred to the national literature, but the theoretical assumptions, critical perspectives, and value judgements made have often replicated those of the British establishment.

COMPARISONS BETWEEN TWO OR MORE REGIONS

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emerge
until the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred on
their own literary and cultural traditions. Victorian Britain had exulted

Post-Colonial Transformation
Bill Ashcroft
London and New York
First published 2001
by Routledge

Contents
Introduction 1
1 Resistance 18
2 Interpolation
3 Language 56
4 History 82
5 Allegory 104
6 Place 124
7 Habitation 157
8 Horizon 182
9 Globalization 206
Notes 226
Bibliography 228
Index 240

Introduction

From the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, European colonial powers invaded, occupied or annexed a huge area of the globe. That movement outwards, seldom wholeheartedly supported by those countries’ domestic populations, plagued by political opposition and by controversy over the morality or even the practicality of colonial occupation, nevertheless advanced so relentlessly that it has come to determine the cultural and political character of the world.

The pre-dominance of Western civilization by 1914 was unprecedented in the extent of its global reach, but it had been relatively recently acquired. The centuries-long advance of European modernity had been radically accelerated during the eruption of capital-driven, late nineteenth-century imperialism.

The huge contradiction of empire (which also reached its most subtle expression in that period) between the geographical expansion, designed to increase the prestige and economic or political power of the imperial nation, and its professed moral justification, its ‘civilizing mission’ to bring order and civilization to the barbarous hordes, is a contradiction which also continues in subtler forms in the present-day exercise of global power.

There may have been much good, in medical, educational and technological terms, in the colonial impact upon the non- European world. But the simple fact remains that these colonized peoples, cultures and ultimately nations were prevented from becoming what they might have become: they were never allowed to develop into the societies they might have been.

As Basil Davidson points out, the legacy of this colonial control for newly independent governments in Africa ‘was not a prosperous colonial business, but in many ways, a profound colonial crisis’ (1983: 182). As he puts it, in a discussion of the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana into independence, the ‘dish’ the new leaders were handed on the day of independence was old and cracked and little fit for any further use.

Worse than that, it was not an empty dish. For it carried the junk and jumble of a century of colonial muddle and ‘make do,’ and this the new . . . ministers had to accept along with the dish itself. What shone upon its supposedly golden surface was not the reflection of new ideas and ways of liberation, but the shadows of old ideas and ways of servitude. (1973: 94)

For this reason, and because colonial structures were often simply taken over by indigenous élites after independence, the central idea of resistance rhetoric – that ‘independence’ would be the same thing as ‘national liberation’ – was inevitably doomed to disappointment.

But the striking thing about colonial experience is that after colonization postcolonial societies did very often develop in ways which sometimes revealed a remarkable capacity for change and adaptation. A common view of colonization, which represents it as an unmitigated cultural disaster, disregards the often quite extraordinary ways in which colonized societies engaged and utilized imperial culture for their own purposes. This book is concerned with how these colonized peoples responded to the political and cultural dominance of Europe.

Many critics have argued that colonialism destroyed indigenous cultures, but this assumes that culture is static, and underestimates the resilience and adaptability of colonial societies. On the contrary, colonized cultures have often been so resilient and transformative that they have changed the character of imperial culture itself. This ‘transcultural’ effect has not been seamless or unvaried, but it forces us to reassess the stereotyped view of colonized peoples’ victimage and lack of agency.

A common strategy of post-colonial self-assertion has been the attempt to rediscover some authentic pre-colonial cultural reality in order to redress the impact of European imperialism. Invariably such attempts misconceive the link between culture and identity. Culture describes the myriad ways in which a group of people makes sense of, represents and inhabits its world, and as such can never be destroyed, whatever happens to its various forms of expression.

Culture is practised, culture is used, culture is made. ‘Culture has life,’ says Mintz, speaking of the Caribbean, ‘because its content serves as resources for those who employ it, change it, incarnate it. Human beings cope with the demands of everyday life through their interpretative and innovative skills . . . not by ossifying their creative forms, but by using them creatively’ (1974: 19). All cultures move in a constant state of trans formation. The
attempt to understand how post-colonial cultures resisted the power of colonial domination in ways so subtle that they transformed both colonizer and colonized lies at the heart of post-colonial studies.

In 1912 the leader of the French Socialist Party, Jean Jaurès, spoke out in Parliament at the acquisition of Morocco:
I have never painted an idyllic picture of the Muslim populations, and I am well aware of the disorder and oligarchic exploitation by many chiefs which takes place. But, Sirs, if you look deeply into the matter, there existed [before the French takeover] a Moroccan civilization capable of the necessary transformation, capable of evolution and progress, a civilization both ancient and modern… There was a seed for the future, a hope. And let me say that I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope for pacific and human progress – African civilization – by all sorts of ruses and by the brutalities of conquest. (cited in Aldrich 1996: 112)

The most interesting word in this speech is ‘transformation’. Jaurès acknowledges that all cultures transform themselves; this is the natural movement of cultural existence.

How they do so is another matter. He condemns the colonization of Morocco, and, by implication, all colonization, for its crushing of the hope of progress and, specifically, the hope for progress into an African civilization. According to him, Morocco had been robbed of its capacity to become what it might have become. If we think of the case of Morocco magnified many times over, we must see the European colonization of the world as a cultural catastrophe of enormous proportions.

But what Jaurès did not expect, any more than the proponents of the mission civilatrice, was that colonial societies’ capacity for transformation could not be so easily truncated. Although the European view of the civilizing process was nothing less than enforced emulation – colonial cultures should simply imitate their metropolitan occupiers – the processes of imitation themselves, the ‘mimicry’ of the colonizers, as Homi Bhabha has famously suggested (1994), became a paradoxical feature of colonial resistance.

The ambivalence of post-colonial mimicry and the ‘menace’ which
Bhabha sees in it are indicators of the complexity of this resistance. This complexity is linked directly to the transformative nature of cultural identity itself. In his celebrated essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990), Stuart Hall suggests there are two ways of conceiving such identity: ‘The first position defines “cultural identity” in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’ (1990: 223).

Such identity searches for images which impose ‘an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation’ (224). Images of a shared ‘Africanness’, for instance, provide such a coherence, although that Africanness may exist far in the past.

But there is a second view of cultural identity which explores ‘points of deep and significant difference’ (225) and which sees the longed-for, and possibly illusory, condition of ‘uniqueness’ as a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as being.

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.

Far from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (225)

The struggle between a view of identity which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself, and one which sees identity as inextricable from the transformative conditions of material life, is possibly the most deep-seated divide in post-colonial thinking.

Hall goes a long way towards arbitrating this divide when he suggests that cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all but a matter of positioning – ‘Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendent “law of origin”’ (226).

Positioning is, above all, a matter of representation, of giving concrete form to ideological concepts. Representation describes both the site of identity formation and the site of the struggle over identity formation. For the positioning of cultural identity has involved the struggle over the means of representation since colonized peoples first took hold of the colonists’ language to represent themselves. Today the means of representing cultural identity includes the whole range of plastic and visual arts, film and television and, crucially, strategies for consuming these products.

Hence, transformation, which describes one way of viewing cultural identity, also describes the strategic process by which cultural identity is represented. By taking hold of the means of representation, colonized peoples throughout the world have appropriated and transformed those processes into culturally appropriate vehicles. It is this struggle over representation which articulates most clearly the material basis, the constructiveness and dialogic energy of the ‘post-colonial imagination’.

Creative artists often seem to express most forcefully the imaginative vision of a society. But artists, writers and performers only capture more evocatively that capacity for transformation which is demonstrated at every level of society. ‘When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a child in Kingston,’ says Hall, ‘I was surrounded by the signs, the music and rhythms of this Africa of the diaspora, which only existed as a result of a long and discontinuous series of transformations’ (231).

The imaginative and the creative are integral aspects of that process by which identity itself has come into being. Cultural identity does not exist outside representation. But the transformative nature of cultural identity leads directly to the transformation of those strategies by which it is represented. These strategies have invariably been the very ones used by the colonizer to position the colonized as marginal and inferior, but their appropriation has been ubiquitous in the struggle by colonized peoples to empower themselves.

This suggests that ‘resistance’ can be truly effective, that is, can avoid simply replacing one tyranny with another, only when it creates rather than simply defends. Post-colonial writing hinges on the act of engagement which takes the dominant language and uses it to express the most deeply felt issues of postcolonial social experience.

This form of ‘imitation’ becomes the key to transforming not only the imitator but the imitated. The engagement of post-colonial writing is one which had transcultural consequences, that is, dialectic and circulating effects which have become a crucial feature of the world we experience today.

Given the positive and productive effects of this capacity in post-colonial society, the question must be asked: does the fact of transformation, the capacity of colonized peoples to make dominant discourse work for them, to develop economically and technologically, to enjoy the ‘benefits’ of global capitalism, mean that the colonized have had a measure of ‘moral luck’ as philosopher Bernard Williams puts it (1981: 20– 39)?

This would be comparable to saying that the political prisoner has been fortunate because he has been able to write, in prison, an auto-biography which caught the imagination of the world, as Nelson Mandela has with Long Walk to Freedom. One might even say that such imprisonment has even been a crucial factor in the ultimate overthrow of the apartheid regime. How do we assess the moral dilemma of such a possibility?

If we gained advantages from imperial discourse – even if it was only the pressure to focus on our own freedom, to concentrate on the things which we value most, not to mention the material and technological advantages of metropolitan society – was colonization ultimately good for us?

Or, to take another example: consider the human and social catastrophe caused by the colonial development of the sugar plantation economies of the Caribbean. The obliteration of the indigenous Amerindians, the capture and disinheritance of millions of Africans transported as slaves, the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of South Asian indentured workers, the wholesale destruction of the landscapes of islands turned into virtual sugar factories, the institution of endemic poverty and the destruction of economic versatility. The effects of the colonization of the Caribbean appear to be an unprecedented disaster.

Yet the creole populations of the Caribbean proceeded to develop a culture so dynamic and vibrant that it has affected the rest of the world. How is one to judge the cultural effects of imperialism under these circumstances?

Spivak calls this the deconstructive moment of post-coloniality. Why is the name ‘post-colonial’ specifically useful in our moment?

Those of us . . . from formerly colonized countries, are able to communicate
with each other, to exchange, to establish sociality, because we have access to the culture of imperialism. Shall we then assign to that culture, in the words of the ethical philosopher Bernard Williams, a measure of ‘moral luck’? I think that there can be no question that the answer is ‘no.’ This impossible ‘no’ to a structure, which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and everyday here and now named ‘post-coloniality’ is a case of it. (1993: 60)

The concept of ‘moral luck’ is a strategic suppression of the liberatory capacity of colonized societies. Much more interesting than the ethical conundrum, the ‘deconstructive moment’, in which the post-colonial subject lives within the consequences of imperial discourse while denying it, is the political achievement. In postcolonial engagements with colonial discourse there has been a triumph of the spirit, a transformation effected at the level of both the imaginative and the material, which has changed the ways in which both see each other and themselves. Agonizing over the benefits of colonization is like asking what the society might have become without it: the question is unanswerable and ultimately irrelevant.

This book focuses instead on the resilience, adaptability and inventiveness of post-colonial societies, which may, if we consider their experiences as models for resistance, give us insight into the operation of local engagements with global culture. By eluding the moral conundrum and simply investigating how transformation affected the imaginative and material dimensions of post-colonial life, we arrive at a form of resistance which is not so much deconstructive (or contradictory) as dynamic, not so much ethically insoluble
as practically affirmative.

The term ‘post-colonial’

This book uses the terms ‘post-colonial’ and ‘transformation’ quite deliberately, for the kinds of cultural and political engagements it examines are characterized by the unique power relationships operating within European colonialism.

Post-colonial studies developed as a way of addressing the cultural production of those societies affected by the historical phenomenon of colonialism. In this respect it was never conceived of as a grand theory but as a methodology: first, for analysing the many strategies by which colonized societies have engaged imperial discourse; and second, for studying the ways in which many of those strategies are shared by colonized societies, re-emerging in very different political and cultural circumstances.

However, there has hardly been a more hotly contested term in contemporary theoretical discourse. Since its entry into the mainstream in the late 1980s with the publication of The Empire Writes Back there has been a constant flood of ‘introductions’ to the field, most of them focusing on the work of the ‘colonial discourse’ theorists: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Post-colonialism means many things and embraces a dizzying array of critical practices. Stephen Slemon surveyed the situation evocatively when he remarked in ‘The Scramble for Post-Colonialism’ that the term has been used in recent times as a way of ordering a critique of totalising forms of Western historicism; as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of ‘class’, as a subset of both postmodernism and post-structuralism (and conversely, as the condition from which those two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique themselves are seen to emerge); as the name for a condition of nativist longing in post-independence national groupings; as a cultural marker of non-residency for a Third-World intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power; as an oppositional form of ‘reading practice’; and – and this was my first encounter with the term – as the name for a category of ‘literary’ activity which sprang from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called ‘Commonwealth’ literary studies. (1994: 16–17)

Even the term ‘postmodernism’ cannot claim to be a repository of such a wide and contradictory variety of critical practices. Those in least doubt about its meaning are invariably its opponents. Shohat and Stam’s complaint is that ‘Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term “postcolonial,” postcolonial theory has curiously failed to address the politics of location of the term “postcolonial” itself’ (1994: 37).

One might well wonder where Shohat and Stam had been. For at times it seems as though no other contemporary discourse has been so obsessed with the politics of its location. This comment demonstrates the way in which a particular form of postcolonial study, one that focuses on the work of celebrated theorists operating from the metropolitan academy, can be assumed to be the whole of post-colonialism. Such a construction of post-colonial practice patently fails to address the emergence of the term in the cultural discourse of formerly colonized peoples, peoples whose work is inextricably grounded in the experience of colonization.

Not all forms of post-colonial practice can be constituted as ‘transformative’, but that discourse which has developed the greatest transformative energy stems from a grounding in the material and historical experience of colonialism.

Arif Dirlik, while narrowing down the categories of the term, sees problems
emerging from the identification of post-colonial intellectuals. The term postcolonial in its various usages carries a multiplicity of meanings that
need to be distinguished for analytical purposes.

Three uses of the term seem to me to be especially prominent (and significant): (a) as a literal description of conditions in formerly colonial societies, in which case the term has concrete referents, as in postcolonial societies or postcolonial intellectuals; (b) as a description of a global condition after the period of colonialism, in which case the usage is somewhat more abstract and less concrete in reference, comparable in its vagueness to the earlier term Third World, for which it is intended as a substitute; and© as a description of a discourse on the above-named conditions that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those conditions.

Even at its most concrete, the significance of postcolonial is not transparent
because each of its meanings is overdetermined by the others. Postcolonial intellectuals are clearly the producers of a post-colonial discourse, but who exactly are the postcolonial intellectuals? . . . Now that postcoloniality has been released from the fixity of Third World location, the identity of the postcolonial is no longer structural but discursive. Postcolonial in this perspective represents an attempt to regroup intellectuals of uncertain location under the banner of postcolonial discourse. Intellectuals in the flesh may produce the themes that constitute postcolonial discourse, but it is participation in the discourse that defines them as post-colonial intellectuals. Hence it is important to delineate the discourse so as to identify postcolonial intellectuals themselves. (1994: 331–2)

The contention that ‘the identity of the postcolonial intellectual is no longer structural but discursive’ illuminates the need for some signifier of the difference between post-colonialisms which distinguishes the different locations and different orientations of its practice. If ‘the conditions in formerly colonized societies’ have any bearing on a ‘global condition after the period of colonialism’, this relationship needs to be analysed. Although Dirlik considers these to be simply variant meanings of the term, there are determinate, historical ways in which the material, political and cultural conditions of formerly colonized societies have impacted on global culture.

Indeed, it is in assessing these that we may understand the transformative impact of post-colonial cultural strategies on global cultures. An investigation of the emergence of the term ‘post-colonial’ reveals how and why such a range of meanings has come to surround its use. Employed by historians and political scientists after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘post-colonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period.

However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. The study of the discursive power of colonial representation was initiated by Edward Said’s landmark work Orientalism in 1978 and led to the development of what came to be called ‘colonialist discourse theory’ in the work of critics such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha.

However, the actual term ‘post-colonial’ was not employed in the early studies of colonial discourse theory, rather it was first used to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies in literary circles. The second issue of New Literature Review in 1977, for instance, focused on ‘post-colonial literatures’, and this was the recognition of a widespread, though informal, acceptance of the term amongst literary critics. The term had emerged as part of an attempt to politicize and focus the concerns of fields such as Commonwealth literature and the study of the so-called New Literatures in English which had been initiated in the late 1960s.

The term has subsequently been widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies from the former British Empire.

A simple hyphen has come to represent an increasingly diverging set of assumptions, emphases, strategies and practices in post-colonial reading and writing. The hyphen puts an emphasis on the discursive and material effects of the historical ‘fact’ of colonialism, while the term ‘postcolonialism’ has come to represent an increasingly indiscriminate attention to cultural difference and marginality of all kinds, whether a consequence of the historical experience of colonialism or not. Perhaps more telling is the relationship of these forms of analysis to the contemporary European philosophical cultural discourses of poststructuralism and postmodernism.

The spelling of the term ‘post-colonial’ has become more of an issue for those who use the hyphenated form, because the hyphen is a statement about the particularity, the historically and culturally grounded nature of the experience it represents. Grounded in the practice of critics concerned with the writings of colonized peoples themselves, it came to stand for a theory which was oriented towards the historical and cultural experience of colonized peoples, a concern with textual production, rather than towards the fetishization of theory itself.

The hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ is a particular form of ‘space-clearing’ gesture (Appiah 1992: 241), a political notation which has a very great deal to say about the materiality of political oppression. In this respect the hyphen distinguishes the term from the kind of unlocated, abstract and poststructuralist theorizing to which Shohat and Stam object.

Admittedly the hyphen can be misleading, particularly if it suggests that postcolonialism refers to the situation in a society ‘after colonialism’, an assumption which remains tediously persistent despite constant rebuttals by post-colonialists. Anne McClintock suggests that the term postcolonial . . . is haunted by the very figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, the term postcolonialism marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from ‘the precolonial’, to ‘the colonial’, to ‘the post-colonial’ – an unbidden, if disavowed commitment to linear time and the idea of development.

If a theoretical tendency to envisage ‘Third World’ literature as progressing from ‘protest literature’ to ‘resistance literature’ to ‘national literature’ has been criticized for rehearsing the Enlightenment trope of sequential linear progress, the term postcolonialism is questionable for the same reason. Metaphorically poised on the border between old and new, end and beginning, the term heralds the end of a world era but by invoking the same trope of linear progress which animated that era. (1995: 10–11)

This seems to be a ghost which refuses to be exorcized. Undoubtedly the ‘post’ in ‘post-colonialism’ must always contend with the spectre of linearity and the kind of teleological development it sets out to dismantle. But rather than being disabling, this radical instability of meaning gives the term a vibrancy, energy and plasticity which have become part of its strength, as post-colonial analysis rises to engage issues and experiences which have been out of the purview of metropolitan theory and, indeed, comes to critique the assumptions of that theory.

More pertinently perhaps, the term has expanded to engage issues of cultural
diversity, ethnic, racial and cultural difference and the power relations within them, as a consequence of an expanded and more subtle understanding of the dimensions of neo-colonial dominance. This expanded understanding embraces the apparently ambiguous situation of Chicano experience in the USA. Alfred Arteaga explains that Chicanos are products of two colonial contexts. The first begins with the explorer Colón and the major event of the Renaissance: the ‘old’ world’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘new.’ Spanish colonization of the Americas lasted more than three centuries, from the middle of Leonardo da Vinci’s lifetime to the beginning of Queen Victoria’s.

. . . The second colonial context begins with the immigration of Austin’s group from Connecticut to Texas, Mexico. (1994: 21)

Engaging the actual complexity and diversity of European colonization, as well as the pervasiveness of neo-colonial domination, opens the way for a wide application of the strategies of post-colonial analysis.

However, one of the most curious and perhaps confusing features of post-colonial study is its overlap with the strategies of postmodern discourse. Asking the question, ‘Is the post in post-colonialism the same as the post in postmodernism?’ Anthony Kwame Appiah says:

All aspects of contemporary African cultural life including music and some sculpture and painting, even some writings with which the West is largely not familiar – have been influenced – often powerfully – by the transition of African societies through colonialism, but they are not all in the relevant sense postcolonial. For the post in postcolonial, like the post in postmodern is the post of the spaceclearing gesture I characterised earlier: and many areas of contemporary African cultural life – what has come to be theorised as popular culture, in particular – are not in this way concerned with transcending – with going beyond – coloniality.

Indeed, it might be said to be a mark of popular culture that its borrowings from international cultural forms are remarkably insensitive to – not so much dismissive of as blind to – the issue of neocolonialism or ‘cultural imperialism’. (1992: 240–1)

This is an astute perception. But the post-colonial, as it is used to describe and analyse the cultural production of colonized peoples, is precisely the production that occurs through colonialism, because no decolonizing process, no matter how oppositional, can remain free from that cataclysmic experience. Once we determine that post-colonial analysis will address ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2), our sense of the ‘space-clearing gesture’ of which Appiah speaks becomes far more subtle, far more attuned to the transformative potential of post-colonial engagements with imperial discourse.

It is quite distinct from the space-clearing gesture in postmodernism. Post-colonial discourse is the discourse of the colonized, which begins with colonization and doesn’t stop when the colonizers go home. The postcolonial is not a chronological period but a range of material conditions and a rhizomic pattern of discursive struggles, ways of contending with various specific forms of colonial oppression. The problem with terminology, the problem with the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism, lies in the fact that they are both, in their very different and culturally located ways, discursive elaborations of postmodernity, just as imperialism and Enlightenment philosophy were discursive elaborations of modernity.

Crucially, words such as ‘post-colonial’ do not describe essential forms of experience but forms of talk about experience. If the term ‘post- colonial’ seems to be homogenizing in the way it brings together the experiences of colonialism in a wide variety of situations, it must also be remembered that these experiences are just as various within particular national or linguistic communities. Once we see the term ‘post-colonial’ as representing a form of talk rather than a form of experience we will be better equipped to see that such talk encompasses a wide and interwoven text of experiences.

For instance, what is the essential experience of oppression, of invasion,
of domination? These involve various forms of material experience, located in their specific historical and political environments. Just as the experiences of colonization within colonized societies have varied from the most abject suffering to the engendering of filiative feeling, the responses of those colonized societies to colonialism have occupied a continuum from absolute complicity to violent rebellion, all of which can be seen to be ‘post-colonial’.

If we see post-colonial discourse in the Foucauldian sense as a system of knowledge of colonized societies, a space of enunciation, the rules which govern the possibility of statements about the field, we must still confirm the discursive significance of language, of talk about experience. If it is the potential of the political subject to intervene, to engage the power of the modern imperial state, post-colonial writing testifies to discourse in which this may occur, and interpolation the strategy by which it may occur.

Modes of transformation

The following chapters address some of the fundamental issues which arise in postcolonial responses to imperial discourse. The Western control over time and space, the dominance of language and the technologies of writing for perpetuating the modes of this dominance, through geography, history, literature and, indeed, through the whole range of cultural production, have meant that post-colonial engagements with imperial power have been exceptionally wide-ranging.

The one thing which characterizes all these engagements, the capacity shared by many forms of colonial experience, is a remarkable facility to use the modes of the dominant discourse against itself and transform it in ways that have been both profound and lasting.

The question of resistance lies at the forefront of this analysis because the concept of resistance has always dwelt at the heart of the struggle between imperial power and post-colonial identity. The problem with resistance is that to see it as a simple oppositionality locks it into the very binary which Europe established to define its others.

Very often, political struggle is contrary to the modes of adaptation and
appropriation most often engaged by post-colonial societies. This discussion reveals that ‘resistance’, if conceived as something much more subtle than a binary opposition, has always operated in a wide range of processes to which post-colonial societies have subjected imperial power. The most sustained, far-reaching and effective interpretation of post-colonial resistance has been the ‘resistance to absorption’, the appropriation and transformation of dominant technologies for the purpose of reinscribing and representing post-colonial cultural identity.

One of the key features of this transformative process has been the entry, aggressive or benign, of post-colonial acts and modes of representation into the dominant discourse itself, an interpolation which not only interjects and interrupts that discourse but changes it in subtle ways. This term ‘interpolation’ ironically reverses Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ by ascribing to the colonial subject, and, consequently, to the colonial society, a capacity for agency which is effected within relationships that are radically unequal. Interpolation recasts our perception of the trajectory of power operating in colonization.

Rather than being swallowed up by the hegemony of empire, the apparently dominated culture, and the ‘interpellated’ subjects within it, are quite able to interpolate the various modes of imperial discourse to use it for different purposes, to counter its effects by transforming them.

Language is the key to this interpolation, the key to its transformative potential, for it is in language that the colonial discourse is engaged at its most strategic point.

With the appropriation of language comes the persistent question of how texts mean. For if the meaning were to be limited to either the writer or the reader, or indeed, somehow embodied in the language itself, then the radical communication, which post-colonial writing itself represents, could not occur. The question of transformation, and the phenomenon of communication between cultures, therefore, lead us into a recognition of the constitutive processes of meaning. The constitutive theory proposed here is one which emphasizes the acts of writing and reading as social rather than solitary, a sociality within which language is appropriated and transformed.

It is upon the foundation of this particular transformation that post-colonial writing is built. But its capacity to stand as a model for a wide range of appropriations is almost unlimited.

Historiography has been one of the most far-reaching and influential imperial constructions of subjectivity, and post-colonial histories, responding to the power of this discourse, have interpolated the narrativity of history while disrupting it by blurring the boundaries that would seem to separate it from literature.

Representations of human time and human space have been the most powerful and hegemonic purveyors of Eurocentrism in modern times. History, and its associated teleology, has been the means by which European concepts of time have been naturalized and universalized. How history might be ‘re-written’, how it might be interpolated, is a crucial question for the self-representation of colonized peoples. Ultimately, the transformation of history stands as one of the most strategic and powerfully effective modes of cultural resistance.

By interpolating history through literary and other nonempirical texts, post-colonial narratives of historical experience reveal the fundamentally
allegorical nature of history itself.

The issues surrounding the concept of place – how it is conceived, how it differs from ‘space’ or ‘location’, how it enters into and produces cultural consciousness, how it becomes the horizon of identity – are some of the most difficult and debated in post-colonial experience. Where is one’s ‘place’? What happens to the concept of ‘home’ when home is colonized, when the very ways of conceiving home, of talking about it, writing about it, remembering it, begin to occur through the medium of the colonizer’s way of seeing the world?

The Eurocentric control of space, through its ocularcentrism, its cartography, its development of perspective, its modes of surveillance, and above all through its language, has been the most difficult form of cultural control faced by post-colonial societies.

Resistance to dominant assumptions about spatial location and the identity of place has occurred most generally in the way in which such space has been inhabited.

Habitation describes a way of being in place, a way of being which itself defines and transforms place. It is so powerful because the coercive pressures of colonialism and globalization have ultimately no answer to it. Whether affected by imperial discourse or by global culture, the local subject has a capacity to incorporate such influences into a sense of place, to appropriate a vast array of resources into the business of establishing and confirming local identity. To what extent is inhabiting a place not only a statement of identity but also a means of transforming the conditions of one’s life?

The conceptual shift from ‘space’ to ‘place’ which occurs as a result of
colonial experience is a shift from empty space to a human, social space which gains its material and ideological identity from the practices of inhabiting. Habitation, in its reconfiguration of conceptions of space, also engages the most profound principles of Western epistemology: its passion for boundaries, its cultural and imaginative habits of enclosure.

It is, ultimately, in the capacity to transcend the trope of the boundary, to live ‘horizonally’, that post-colonial habitation offers the most radical principle of transformative resistance. It is in horizonality that the true force of transformation becomes realized, for whereas the boundary is about cultural regulation, the horizon is about cultural possibility.

The concept of ‘horizon’ proposes a theoretical principle for that movement beyond epistemological, cultural and spatial boundaries to which post-colonial discourses aspire. The horizon is a way of reconceiving the bounded precepts of imperial discourse, a principle which defines the dynamic and transformative orientation of those myriad acts by which post-colonial societies engage colonial power.

The question which must be faced ultimately is: does the concern with colonization involve an intellectual orientation that is inescapably backward-looking? Do we find ourselves looking back to the effects of power relationships which no longer seem relevant? The answer to this is twofold: the effects of European imperialism and the transformative engagements it has experienced from post-colonial societies are ones that have affected, and continue to affect, most of the world to the present day.

This engagement has come to colour and identify the very nature of those societies in contemporary times. But the other answer suggests that the very dynamic we are analysing here, the dynamic of the power relationships which characterize colonial experience, has now achieved a global status. The issue of globalization recasts the whole question of post-colonial identity.

Both imperialism and globalization are consequences of the onrushing tide of European modernity. But while we cannot see globalization as a simple extension of imperialism, a kind of neo-imperialism, as early globalization theory proposed, the engagement of imperial culture by post-colonial
societies offers a compelling model for the relationship between the local and the global today.
The ways in which local communities consume global culture continually disrupt the ‘development’ paradigm which has characterized the representation of the Third World by the West since the Second World War. Whereas ‘development’ acts to force the local into globally normative patterns, ‘transformation’ acts to adjust those patterns to the requirements of local values and needs.

This capacity to adjust global influences to local needs disrupts the simple equation of globalization and Westernization, the idea that globalization is a simple top-down homogenizing pressure. Post-colonial transformation emerged from a power relationship – between European imperial discourse and colonial societies – that was in many ways unique.

Different colonies were inevitably oriented towards a particular empire, a particular metropolitan centre and language, and led to particular kinds of discursive transformations.

But the range of strategies which has characterized those transformations
can be seen to operate on a global scale. It is tempting to suggest that this is because the consequences of European imperialism itself have ultimately reached global proportions.

But it is the range of strategies, the tenacity and the practical assertiveness of the apparently powerless with which we are most concerned, not with the relationship between imperialism and globalism. When we project our analysis on to a global screen we find that the capacity, the agency, the inventiveness of post-colonial transformation help us to explain something about the ways in which local communities resist absorption and transform global culture itself. In the end the transformative energy of post-colonial societies tells us about the present because it is overwhelmingly
concerned with the future.

1 Resistance

In her celebrated testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, the author gives an account of an appalling atrocity in the 1970s in which Guatemalan government soldiers force villagers from several villages to watch as their relatives, arrested on suspicion of subversion, are systematically tortured, degraded and burnt alive. The incident stands as a symbol of that cruelty and abuse, that terrorism of power, which colonized societies have continually resisted. It also focuses some exceptionally complex, and controversial, questions of truth and representation, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Yet what it means to resist effectively is a key question, perhaps the question to emerge from her account.

When we compare Menchú’s response with that of her father, we discover two models of resistance between which post-colonial societies have continually alternated in their reaction to colonial dominance. Observing her father’s response Menchú says: ‘My father was incredible; I watched him and he didn’t shed a tear, but he was full of rage. And that was a rage we all felt’ (1983: 178). Her father’s stoicism during this act of barbarity was like a rock against the power of the government’s terror, and the passage offers him as an example of the Indians’ spirit of resistance.

‘[I]f so many people were brave enough to give their lives, their last moments, their last drop of blood,’ he says, ‘then wouldn’t we be brave enough to do the same?’ (181). The experience politicized him completely. He became an organizer of resistance groups throughout Guatemala but was killed in the
occupation of the Spanish embassy. But we are left with lingering doubts about what he achieved. If Menchú’s father was a rock, then the rock was smashed by the sledgehammer of the state, along with all resistance which reduces the struggle to one of brute force.

On the other hand, Rigoberta Menchú’s resistance was more elusive and covert, as she organized communities of Indians against the government. In this respect her testimonio demonstrates the fine balance between resistance and transformation in revolutionary activity – opposition is necessary, but the appropriation of forms of representation, and forcing entry into the discursive networks of cultural dominance, have always been a crucial feature of resistance movements which have gained political success. The co-operation of the Indian groups was made possible only by using the colonizing language as well as other culturally alien structures of organization.

But Menchú’s most effective resistance to the overt brutality of the state,
the most resilient opposition to material oppression, is the discursive resistance which gained her a global audience, the resistance located in her testimonio itself. Rigoberta Menchú and her father shared a deep anger against the terrorism of power. But the radically different strategies emerging from that anger compel us to examine the concept of resistance itself.

Resistance has become a much-used word in post-colonial discourse, and indeed in all discussion of ‘Third World’ politics. Armed rebellion, inflammatory tracts, pugnacious oratory and racial, cultural and political animosity: resistance has invariably connoted the urgent imagery of war. This has much to do with the generally violent nature of colonial incursion. In all European empires the drain on resources to fight wars of rebellion was great. Algerians, for instance, fought a sustained war against French conquest for two decades after 1830, led by Abd El Khader.

Although colonial wars were usually of shorter duration, such protracted hostilities were not uncommon, and often led to profound cultural consequences, such as the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 in New Zealand which concluded the Maori wars, falsely ceding Maori mana to the Crown.1 Armed rebellion began in the Caribbean as early as 1501, and, according to Julio Le Riverend, the Governor of Cuba, Ovando, ‘asked for the complete prohibition of the [slave] trade, for, in previous years, the Negroes had shown an open tendency towards rebellion and conspiracy’ (Riverend 1967: 82).

The often unabashedly exploitative nature of colonial economic ventures, the actively racist attitudes of colonists – even those from France, which was determined to assimilate colonial societies into French political and administrative structures – and the overweening assumption of moral authority for colonial expansion, meant that political resentment, the motive for armed resistance, was constant. Indeed, such armed rebellion, from the ‘Indian Mutiny’ to the resistance movements in Kenya, Zimbabwe and other African states, became the very focus of indigenous demands for self-determination.

But we might well ask whether this armed or ideological rebellion is the only
possible meaning of resistance, and, more importantly, whether such a history leaves in its wake a rhetoric of opposition emptied of any capacity for social change.

Observing the way in which colonial control was often ejected by national liberation movements only to be replaced by equally coercive indigenous élites, we might well ask: What does it really mean to resist? Does the term ‘resistance’ adequately describe cultural relationships, cultural oppositions or cultural influences in the era of globalization? Given the widespread feelings of opposition in colonized communities, ‘resistance’ enacted as violent military engagement, a national liberation struggle, or, for that matter, even as a programme of widespread social militancy, is surprisingly rare.

Ultimately, ‘resistance’ is a word which adapts itself to a great variety of circumstances, and few words show a greater tendency towards cliché and empty rhetoric, as it has become increasingly used as a catch-all word to
describe any kind of political struggle. But if we think of resistance as any form of defence by which an invader is ‘kept out’, the subtle and sometimes even unspoken forms of social and cultural resistance have been much more common. It is these subtle and more widespread forms of resistance, forms of saying ‘no’, that are most interesting because they are most difficult for imperial powers to combat.

One question this raises is: can one ‘resist’ without violence? Can one even resist without obviously ‘opposing’? The answer to this is obviously ‘yes!’ Gandhi’s ‘passive resistance’ to the British Raj is a famous and effective example. But the most fascinating feature of post-colonial societies is a ‘resistance’ that manifests itself as a refusal to be absorbed, a resistance which engages that which is resisted in a different way, taking the array of influences exerted by the dominating power, and altering them into tools for expressing a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being.

This has been the most widespread, most influential and most quotidian form of ‘resistance’ in post-colonial societies. In some respects, as in the debate over the use of colonial languages, it has also been the most contentious. Consequently, this engagement with colonial discourse has rarely been regarded as ‘resistance’, because it is often devoid of the rhetoric of resistance. While the soldiers and politicians have gained most attention, it is the ordinary people – and the artists and writers, through whom a transformative vision of the world has been conceived – who have often done most to ‘resist’ the cultural pressures upon them.

In most cases this has not been a heroic enterprise but a pragmatic and mundane array of living strategies to which imperial culture has no answer. In this respect ‘transformation’ is contrary to what we normally think of as ‘resistance’ because the latter has been locked into the party-political
imagery of opposition, a discourse of ‘prevention’. But post-colonial transformation has been the most powerful and active form of resistance in colonized societies because it has been so relentless, so everyday and, above all, so integral a part of the imaginations of these societies.
Resistance which ossifies into simple opposition often becomes trapped in the very binary which imperial discourse uses to keep the colonized in subjection. As Coetzee’s protagonist, Dawn, puts it in Dusklands:
The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth
predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of
mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of new mythology. (1974: 24–5)

The most tenacious aspect of colonial control has been its capacity to bind the colonized into a binary myth. Underlying all colonial discourse is a binary of colonizer/colonized, civilized/uncivilized, white/black which works to justify the mission civilatrice and perpetuate a cultural distinction which is essential to the ‘business’ of economic and political exploitation.

The idea that ‘counterforce’ is the best response to the colonialist myth of force, or to the myth of nurture, both of which underly this civilizing mission, binds the colonized into the myth. This has often implicated colonized groups and individuals in a strategy of resistance which has been unable to resist absorption into the myth of power, whatever the outcome of their political opposition.

Dependency theorists who re-write the story of Europe as ‘developer’ into the story of Europe as ‘exploiter’ remain caught in the binary of Europe and its others. The subject of the new history is still Europe. Ironically, the
concept of ‘difference’ itself may often be unable to extricate itself from this binary and thus become disabling to the post-colonial subject.

Intellectuals who set so much store by independence in the post-war dissolution of the British Empire were uniformly doomed to disappointment. National élites simply moved in to fill the vacuum. In most cases ‘resistance’ has meant nothing less than a failure to resist the binary structures of colonial discourse. But a difference which resists domination through the transformative capacity of the imagination is one which, ultimately, moves beyond these structures. The importance of transformation should not be regarded as diminishing the struggle for political freedom and selfdetermination, or refuting the active ‘resistance’ to imperial power. Nor should it be regarded as contrary to the spirit of insurgence. Rather it demonstrates the fascinating capacity of ordinary people, living below the level of formal policy or active rebellion.

LA CRISIS DE LA MODERNIDAD REQUIERE UNA TRANSFORMACIÓN CIVILIZATORIA
por VÍCTOR MANUEL TOLEDO

(I) Una nueva utopística

Todas las variantes que pregonaban la transformación de las sociedades han quedado hechas añicos, se volvieron “confeti de colores”. La realidad del mundo de hoy, globalizado, interconectado, hipertecnológico y que ha alcanzado los máximos históricos de la explotación ecológica y social, ha enviado a las principales propuestas del cambio social al depósito de lo inservible. Ni la revolución armada ni la reforma por la vía electoral son ya caminos viables y adecuados para emancipar a las sociedades. Ante la crisis de la modernidad industrial necesitamos una transformación civilizatoria. Y eso implica la revisión del pensamiento crítico y las acciones emancipadoras y de la adopción de nuevos paradigmas. El viejo dilema entre “reforma o revolución” ha quedado superado y desbordado por la compleja realidad. Los revolucionarios y los reformistas de todo tipo se han vuelto anacrónicos. Estamos ante una singular paradoja: han surgido los revolucionarios decadentes y los reformistas obsoletos, que siguen actuantes y, aún más, protagonizan numerosas batallas de triunfo imposible.

Hoy, intentar una transformación de las sociedades mediante la vía de las armas es el acto más descabellado conocido. Atrás quedó la épica revolucionaria que, serenamente analizada, indujo actos de suicidio colectivo y demencia general, alimentados por la política y la ideología convertidas en religión o dogma. Intentar una revolución armada supone hoy dar a los grandes aparatos tecno-militares la oportunidad de probar, a manera de experimento, sus nuevos y refinados armamentos, basados en la aplicación de las ciencias de frontera, como la robótica, la nanotecnología, la electrónica, la balística, la tecnología satelital o la geomática. Solamente las 10 mayores corporaciones fabricantes de armas en conjunto realizaron ventas en 2013 por 202.4 mil millones de dólares y emplearon a más de 900 mil trabajadores, incluidos unos 100 mil científicos (véase http://regeneracion.mx/las-10-empresas-que-mas-se-benefician-con-las-guerras/). Un dron (aeronave no pilotada) puede ¡localizar una huella humana a 1.5 kilómetros de distancia!

De la vía electoral no puede decirse menos. La llamada “democracia representativa”, dominante como práctica, se ha vuelto una ilusión alimentada puntualmente por los aparatos de la propaganda y los anestésicos de los explotadores. El poder económico actual, el capital corporativo, controla, domina y determina a las clases políticas del planeta como si fueran un manso rebaño de ovejas. La llegada de partidos o dirigentes en apariencia alternativos, o son meramente temporales, es decir tolerables por un tiempo, o fácilmente cooptables o eliminables. La fantasía de la democracia cosmética, la idea de que el voto da de manera mágica representatividad a un individuo, es irreal en tanto no haya un efectivo control social sobre las decisiones cotidianas del representante. Y eso tiene que ver con la ausencia de la escala y el espacio, con la existencia de una democracia desterritorializada y sin control social. Sólo un sistema que elige representantes por territorios o regiones y que escala en la construcción de una estructura de “abajo hacia arriba”, al amparo del riguroso principio de “mandar obedeciendo”, resulta real. Se trata de poner en práctica una verdadera democracia participativa, radical o territorial (grass roots democracy).

Hoy, la “nueva utopística” (según la acepción que ofreció I. Wallerstein) es la creación gradual y paulatina de zonas emancipadas, de islas ganadas al control ciudadano o social, de territorios defendidos primero y liberados después, defendidos y liberados de los poderes políticos y económicos que, en pleno contubernio, explotan a la mayoría de los seres humanos. Se trata de islas anticapitalistas, contraindustriales, posmodernas, cuya consolidación y concatenación dan lugar a territorios liberados que comenzaron defendiéndose y han logrado ya emanciparse porque ahí domina el poder social, llámese como se llame (autogobierno, autogestión, soberanía popular). La “nueva utopística”, la que visualizaron Boaventura de Sousa Santos y André Gorz, es “el socialismo, raizal, ecológico y tropical” de Orlando Fals-Borda, “las prácticas emancipadoras descolonizadas” de Raúl Zibechi y la vuelta a esa esfera doméstica de la reproducción de la vida detectada por Fernand Braudel en algunas de sus obras.

La “nueva utopística” se construye en territorios rurales y urbanos, e implica por supuesto un esfuerzo de conciencia, trabajo y solidaridad que no es nuevo sino que, simplemente, fue diluido y olvidado en el imaginario de la modernidad, pero que aún está presente en los pueblos tradicionales (campesinos, indígenas, de pescadores, pastores, recolectores) como una práctica “normal y cotidiana” en su reproducción de la vida misma y que se expresa a través de filosofías autóctonas como el buen vivir (Andes), la minga o la comunalidad (Mesoamérica).

En México, como en buena parte de la Latinoamérica y algunos países de Europa, esta tercera vía que conduce a una efectiva transformación civilizatoria avanza a pasos agigantados; no sólo el neozapatismo sino cientos de proyectos locales y regionales eco-políticos lo confirman. Pocos lo ven y casi nadie reconoce su trascendencia. Ello es el resultado de una historia cultural de unos 7 mil años, de una tradición de lucha social de más de 200 años, de la Revolución Agraria de inicios del siglo xx, de las condiciones de extrema explotación y deterioro que hoy se sufre, y hasta de la vigencia de iconos que movilizan a millones como el maíz, Emiliano Zapata o la Virgen de Guadalupe.

(II) El derrumbe ideológico del capitalismo

“Nosotros cantaremos a las grandes masas agitadas por el trabajo, por el placer o por la revuelta: cantaremos a las marchas multicolores y polifónicas de las revoluciones en las capitales modernas, cantaremos al vibrante fervor nocturno de las minas y de las canteras, incendiados por violentas lunas eléctricas; a las estaciones ávidas, devoradoras de serpientes que humean; a las fábricas suspendidas de las nubes por los retorcidos hilos de sus humos; a los puentes semejantes a gimnastas gigantes que husmean el horizonte; y a las locomotoras de pecho amplio, que patalean sobre los rieles, como enormes caballos de acero embridados con tubos, y al vuelo resbaloso de los aeroplanos…” Esto y más escribió Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1867-1944) en su Manifiesto futurista, de 1909, y acaso esta proclama capte y refleje como nada ese impulso nunca antes visto en la historia humana con que el capital se lanzó de lleno a la industrialización imparable, ya recién descubierto el petróleo, su fórmula secreta.

El maravilloso mundo que se avecinaba para la humanidad a inicios del siglo XX, mediante la innovadora combinación de capital, petróleo y tecnología, se vio sin embargo casi de inmediato interrumpido por su sentido inverso. Y esos tres supuestos pináculos del progreso, el confort y la vida convertida en sueño se utilizaron en cambio para la destrucción masiva, la magnificación de la fuerza y el genocidio nunca antes visto en la historia del planeta. La relativa era pacífica surgida con la posguerra volvió a animar durante medio siglo las expectativas de un futuro lleno de plenitudes fincadas en el mercado, las innovaciones científico-tecnológicas y el uso de los combustibles fósiles (petróleo, gas y uranio), especialmente tras la caída de la Unión Soviética, la otra cara de la civilización industrial, convertida en el bastión mundial de una quimera colectivista que se volvió un infierno. El capitalismo entraba de lleno como la única opción de una civilización tecnocrática y materialista basada en el individualismo, la competencia, la corporación, el confort, el consumismo y una necia necesidad por dominar y explotar a la naturaleza. El mejor de los mundos posibles. Marinetti renacía de sus cenizas.

Hoy, los Papeles de Panamá culminan, son el último eslabón de una cadena de sucesos que tras casi una década colocan las ilusiones del capital en pleno descrédito. Toda civilización se mueve en el tiempo, a través de la historia, en la medida en que es capaz de mover la imaginación de los individuos en torno a expectativas de vida. La falsa conciencia opera entonces como el mecanismo que mueve las energías individuales que, articuladas, generan los procesos societarios que mueven a las sociedades. El capitalismo ha sido el motor de la civilización moderna o industrial; y sus fuegos artificiales, luces y luminarias, los impresionantes avances tecno-económicos y el bienestar y confort que ofrece. Pero cada vez queda más al descubierto una realidad distinta. La fórmula por la que apuesta el capitalismo no sólo se queda corta sino que da señales de fatiga, decadencia y, aun, de ineficacia y perversidad. Los enormes aparatos creadores de ideología que bombardean día y noche las mentes de los seres humanos por todos los rincones del planeta se vuelven disfuncionales. La civilización moderna aparece cada día como una gigantesca maquinaria dedicada a la doble explotación que realiza una minoría de minorías sobre el trabajo humano y el de la naturaleza. Tal explotación se adereza, oculta, desvanece, maquilla e incluso justifica por todos los medios posibles. El capitalismo no cumple las expectativas de bienestar, equidad, justicia, seguridad y democracia que siempre pregonó; además, a los ojos de los ciudadanos del mundo aparece como un mecanismo indetenible que parasita y depreda. En este nuevo panorama, el Estado va quedando al descubierto como la instancia dedicada a defender, legitimar, justificar o imponer los intereses del capital corporativo, en el brazo al servicio de la concentración y acumulación de riquezas. Las figuras de los grandes plutócratas, idealizadas y alabadas por revistas, programas televisivos, películas y medios digitales e impresos, desde Walt Disney o Henry Ford hasta Steve Jobs, Bill Gates o Carlos Slim, se desploman y las sustituyen los cientos de empresarios corruptos en pleno contubernio con criminales y mafias políticas. El mercado, concebido como la vara mágica de la innovación, el desarrollo y el progreso, se delinea por la fuerza de los hechos en un escenario brutal de competidores sin escrúpulos o corruptos y en un inexorable perfeccionamiento de los monopolios. El mundo se ha convertido en un gran casino; y su devenir, en guerra despiadada entre el capital y el Estado de un lado y la humanidad y la naturaleza del otro.

El mundo ficción construido por el capital se resquebraja. Antes de los Papeles de Panamá aparecieron la gran crisis financiera de 2008 y el rescate con los impuestos ciudadanos de los bancos quebrados, el espionaje masivo, el lavado de dinero, las trampas de Volkswagen y otras automotrices, los actos corruptos de reyes, presidentes, primeros ministros, cardenales y obispos, magnates y ejércitos, la comprobación científica de la iniquidad social y económica, la megaconcentración de las riquezas, la injusticia agraria mundial, la depredación despiadada de la naturaleza, el peligroso desequilibrio del ecosistema global y los cambios climáticos, el gasto bélico y la amenaza nuclear. La tecnología, el petróleo y el mercado conducidos por la racionalidad del capital han creado un mundo más, no menos, peligroso e injusto. Quedan como testimonios irrefutables los datos duros derivados de sendos estudios. Los 62 seres más ricos del mundo (sólo 9 mujeres entre ellos) poseen una riqueza igual a la de 3 mil 600 millones de otros miembros de la especie (Oxfam Internacional), una situación agravada entre 2010 y 2015. Por otra parte, tres investigadores suizos develaron tras el análisis de la base de datos Orbis 2007, donde figuran 37 millones de empresas, que un grupo de solamente mil 318 corporativos y bancos domina la mayor parte de la economía mundial (New Scientist, 19 de octubre de 2011). Todo ello, mientras luego de dos décadas de reuniones mundiales no se logra detener el calentamiento del planeta que la triada mercado/tecnología/petróleo, la civilización moderna, ha generado.

(III) México, la rebelión silenciosa ya comenzó

Es tiempo de hacer justicia a lo posible. En medio, a un lado o por fuera de la tremenda crisis, otros mundos se construyen de manera silenciosa y a contracorriente de los modelos dominantes. Estos mundos no son visibles a los reflectores de la dominación, a las elites intelectuales ni a los ojos aferrados a los lentes de siempre. Aun los más calificados de los “anteojos emancipadores” siguen asidos a dogmas, algunos que se remontan al siglo xix, tesis anacrónicas, percepciones no correspondientes ya al mundo de hoy. El primer hecho por aceptar, la premisa primera por reconocer, es que el mundo se enfrenta a una crisis de civilización y, por tanto, se requiere una transformación civilizatoria. Ello supone un cuestionamiento radical y profundo de los principales bastiones de la civilización moderna e industrial: el petróleo, el capitalismo, la ciencia, los partidos políticos, los bancos, las corporaciones, la democracia representativa, el consumismo. Dos frases parpadean como estrellas en el firmamento de un nuevo pensamiento crítico: una, de Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them” (“No se pueden resolver los problemas con el mismo pensamiento con que fueron creados”); la otra, de Boaventura de Sousa Santos: “No hay solución moderna a la crisis de la modernidad”.

Una segunda premisa, aceptada por pocos, afirma que el clásico dilema de la transformación social, “reforma o revolución”, “voto o balas” “vía electoral o violenta” ha dejado de tener sentido y se ha convertido en un mito. La razón: en su fase actual, la de la mayor concentración de riqueza en la historia de la humanidad, el capital ha terminado por devorar al Estado y a sus mansos, edulcorados y burocratizados partidos políticos. Los límites entre el poder económico y el político se han diluido o borrado. Se ha vuelto entonces imposible, mediante la vía electoral, lograr los cambios profundos que el mundo requiere con urgencia y que deben superar dos limitaciones supremas de la modernidad: la mayor desigualdad social de que se tenga memoria, y el mayor desequilibrio ecológico a escala planetaria. Los ciudadanos, su poder, han quedado anulados. La sociedad moderna ha perdido su capacidad de autotransformación y, con ello, sus mecanismos de autocorrección en un contexto donde la crisis ecológica amenaza ya la supervivencia humana en el futuro inmediato. La democracia (representativa, formal, institucional), principal aportación de Occidente, se ha convertido en mera ilusión.

¿Cual es entonces el camino para una transformación social a la altura de las circunstancias? La vía, con adeptos crecientes en todo el mundo, es la construcción del poder social o ciudadano, mediante la organización, en territorios concretos. Esto significa tomar el control de los procesos económicos, ecológicos, políticos, financieros, educativos, de vigilancia y de comunicación, en escalas donde sea posible. Y esto puede ser un hogar, un conjunto de hogares, una comunidad rural, una manzana o barrio urbano, un edificio, un municipio entero, una región o una colonia. En esta nueva perspectiva, la posibilidad de cambio por la vía electoral, si se observa potencialmente benéfica, se visualiza como complementaria o accesoria a la vía del poder social en los territorios, nunca como el objetivo central ni único.

Todo esto, comenzado a llamarse pensamiento impolítico, A. Galindo-Hervás (2015) lo sitúa desde Europa en filósofos como G. Agamben, R. Esposito, Jean Luc Nancy y A. Badiou, pero en realidad se nutre de anteriores pensadores iconoclastas, como Ivan Illich, André Gorz o Morris Berman, y especialmente de una sinfonía de autores latinoamericanos: O. Fals-Borda, L. Boff, A. A. Maya, E. Leff, A. Escobar, E. Dussel, el Sub Marcos, y los nuevos seguidores de la ecología política. ¿Por qué Latinoamérica? Por la sencilla razón de que aquí ocurren los experimentos societarios más avanzados del planeta, buena parte inducidos por las recientes rebeliones indígenas y su vigor demográfico, de tal suerte que el pensamiento es reflejo de inéditos procesos civilizatorios, nutridos a su vez de originales reflexiones teóricas. Por eso, Latinoamérica es la región más esperanzadora.

México resulta privilegiado en el contexto descrito, pues su territorio es ya un laboratorio de innumerables experimentos socio-ambientales. No sólo hay en el país múltiples bastiones de reflexión teórica en las universidades públicas y las privadas, y una feroz resistencia ciudadana como la de los profesores democráticos y las de las comunidades opuestas a los proyectos depredadores en 300 puntos del territorio, sino que durante las últimas tres o cuatro décadas se han construido innovadores proyectos locales y regionales en sus zonas rurales. Nuestras investigaciones han levantado un inventario de más de mil proyectos novedosos en sólo cinco estados (Oaxaca, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Puebla y Michoacán; véase “México, regiones que caminan hacia la sustentabilidad: http://www.iberopuebla.mx/i3ma/libros.asp), incluidos los Caracoles Zapatistas, las numerosas cooperativas indígenas de café orgánico y múltiples casos de autogestión comunitaria. Todos estos proyectos se fincan en el poder ciudadano sobre los territorios y en los procesos de producción y comercialización, pero también en la democracia participativa, la autogestión y autodefensa, la creación de bancos locales y regionales, las radios comunitarias, la dignificación de las mujeres, y últimamente en la reconversión hacia otras fuentes de energía solar. Con diferentes grados de integralidad y de éxito, y abarcando diversas escalas, estos proyectos de alteridad civilizatoria avanzan construyendo en regiones y territorios un mundo sin capitalismo, partidos políticos, bancos, empresas, y poniendo en práctica una ciencia que respeta y dialoga con sus propios saberes. Son las islas o burbujas de una nueva civilización. Las expresiones de una transformación silenciosa.

• Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, campus Morelia.

Nota: La tesis central postulada desde hace más de dos décadas por el autor y otros muchos pensadores es que el mundo se enfrenta no a una crisis social, económica, tecnológica, ecológica o moral sino a una crisis civilizatoria, la cual exige nuevas miradas y –también– transformaciones hasta ahora inimaginables en todos los ámbitos. Estos tres ensayos, publicados previamente en La Jornada, ofrecen una apretada síntesis del pensamiento del autor sobre ese tema, e ilustran además lo que viene a ser un análisis formulado desde una perspectiva ecológico-política.