Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces

Table of Contents

Title Page

Translator’s note

Foreword

Foreword to the German edition

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - The Community as Social Machine

Neighborhood Cohesion, a Form of Survival

Urban Communities

CHAPTER 2 - The Self-Constructed City: Dispersion and Difference

CHAPTER 3 - Everyday Life and Insurrection: Undivided Bodies

The Community War

The Micro View

Communication in Movement

CHAPTER 4 - State Powers and Non-state Powers: Difficult Coexistence

Neighborhood Councils as Institutions

Movement as Institution and as a Moving-of-itself

CHAPTER 5 - Community Justice and El Alto Justice

A Non-state Justice

CHAPTER 6 - Toward an Aymara State?

The Idea of State-power Among the Aymaras

Diffused Powers; Centralized Powers

Toward a Multicultural State?

Aymara Ambiguities

EPILOGUE

Bibliography

Index

Support AK Press!

Copyright Page

Translator’s note

by Ramor Ryan

It must be a rare occurrence when translating becomes an actual lived-experience, as the words and text on the page begin to reflect and come alive in the surrounding world. So it was in the winter of 2009, as I began to work on the translation of this book. I awoke one morning in my home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico to the industrious sounds of two hundred indigenous families from the countryside invading and occupying an unused parcel of land adjoining our house. They set about constructing basic dwellings, pirating electricity, digging wells, and organizing the space collectively. They were not Zapatistas, but hung banners proclaiming Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom), and demanded indigenous rights. Was that the morning I began working on the chapter The Self-Constructed City?

The state sent in the riot police a few weeks later, just as I had moved onto the next chapter, Everyday Life and Insurrection. The squatters fought back with sticks and stones, defending their small community with all the passion of rebel insurrectionists. And they won. In an interesting parallel to the Indians of El Alto, they spurned leaders, publicly denouncing those who attempted to speak on their behalf. They dispersed power and refused to allow a separate body of leaders to emerge. Or, as Zibechi writes of the El Alto uprising, the community continues to function as a dispersal machine, always avoiding the concentration of power, and by allowing everyone to be a leader or commander, it inhibits the emergence of leaders with power over the long-term.

Translating Dispersing Power thus became a sociological, anthropological, and political lesson in the reality around me on the outskirts of San Cristobal. Clearly, Zibechi’s important book is relevant not only to El Alto and Bolivia, but also to Mexico and much of the continent. This influenced my translation of the work: I attempt to use an everyday language that will be familiar to engaged, English-speaking readers and will hopefully resonate with them, in their own context and place.

This translation is the fruit of what must be properly described as a collective effort. A number of friends and compañeros have contributed their time and effort. Esteban Véliz Madina and Angelo Moreno were responsible for deciphering the Epilogue by Situaciones Colectivos and worked diligently to make it readable. In Favela—rebel territory within San Cristobal—inhabitants and visitors offered their two cents: I thank Esteban, Cui, Izas, Lord Red Eirigi, and Orlando. Further afield, Luigi Carlos Celentano, Brenda del Rocio Aguilar Marroquin, Michael McCaughan, Ben Dangl, and April Howard offered indispensable insights and commentary. AK Press is a radical and quintessential publishing house. It has been a seamless pleasure working with Zach Blue and Charles Weigl. I am grateful to my long-standing friend Chuck Morse for his discipline and professionalism in proofreading. His rigorous appraisal of the manuscript is, I hope, apparent in the final translation. Nevertheless, I take full responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies that have occurred in the translation, despite this proper flotilla of good counsel.

Finally, I wish to thank he who has accompanied me throughout the whole process, going without my undivided attention to facilitate the work: my young son, Ixim.

Foreword to the English Edition

by Benjamin Dangl

Bolivia is located in the heart of South America and is a country of majestic beauty, with enormous mountain ranges, dry plains, rolling farmland and expansive jungles. It is an exceptionally politicized place; countless workers and students are active in radical unions and organizations, roadblocks and strikes are regular occurrences across the country, and nearly non-stop protests fill the streets of its capital city, La Paz.

The country is currently going through profound social, cultural, and political changes. Though around sixty percent of its population self-identify as indigenous, just over fifty years ago, members of this indigenous majority were not even allowed in the plaza in front of the presidential palace. Now, that same palace is occupied by Evo Morales, an indigenous, former coca grower and union organizer who began his first term in 2006 after a tremendous victory at the polls. Since coming to power, the Morales administration has partially nationalized gas reserves, convened an assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution, distributed unused land to farmers, and granted long overdue rights to indigenous people.

Leading up to the rocky and hopeful period of the Morales administration was a series of uprisings against neoliberalism and state repression, the most dramatic and far-reaching being the Gas War of 2003, in which people across the country rose up against a plan to export Bolivian gas to the US for a low price. Many also protested the unpopular policies and tactics of the Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada government.

El Alto, a rapidly-growing city outside of La Paz, was in the vanguard of this national movement. Residents of the city organized massive road blockades, street barricades and marches that shut the roads down, pressuring those in La Paz to listen to their demands for the renunciation of Sánchez de Lozada and an end to the exploitative gas exportation plan. The courageous people of El Alto were victorious in ousting the president and pressuring the government to change its gas policies. In many ways, Morales’s election owes a lot to the space and momentum created by El Alto. Morales’s time in office has not been without contradictions and challenges, and his relationship with the social movements that helped pave the way to his election has had its ups and downs.

On May 1 of 2006, Morales announced the partial nationalization of Bolivia’s gas reserves. Raúl Zibechi wrote in La Jornada of the president’s actions and the legacy of El Alto: It was during those days [in October 2003] that hydrocarbons were nationalized, because the decree Evo Morales signed on May 1st did not do anything more than legally sanction something that had been won in the streets. He continued, The insurrectionary moment passed to the institutional moment.

Bolivia was not the only country in the region to pass from an insurrectionary moment to an institutional movement. With self-described left-leaning governments in power in Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—that were ushered into office thanks in part to the popular movements in their country—the relationship between the insurrection and the institution is perhaps now more complex and crucial than it has been for decades.

Ecuador offers an example of this relationship. Throughout years of grassroots campaigns, protests, and direct action, the indigenous movements in Ecuador pushed for a participatory, constitutional assembly and against the destruction of the Amazon by neoliberal government policies and oil companies. Presidential candidate Rafael Correa then rode that wave of discontent and popular energy into the presidential palace in 2006, only to turn on the same movements that were essential to his election. While bringing about notable progressive changes, he also began criminalizing the indigenous movement’s protest tactics, pushing them out of the transformative political space they had created, and centralizing his own power. Similar stories have played out between governments and movements across the region.

Zibechi navigated this sociopolitical terrain in a February 2009 article for the Americas Program. He wrote that in varying degrees, this regional electoral shift to the left has meant the marginalization of the social movements, which in the 1990s and at the start of 2000 were the main players in resistance to the neoliberal model; the dominant contradiction has been the dynamic between the government and the right, an issue that pushed many social movements into a pro-state position that has appeared largely avoidable; some tendencies aim to move the social movements toward new bases of support, employing new causes and forms of intervention. Significantly however, he writes that in Bolivia movements have not been defeated and continue to maintain an important capacity to mobilize their bases of support and pressure both the government and the rightwing.

Dispersing Power offers an exciting account of why social movements in Bolivia are so resilient and powerful, making the publication of this book timely; it focuses on the most vibrant social movements that preceded the election of one of the most dynamic and intriguing presidents among the region’s new left.

So much of what Bolivians have organized against, particularly schools of economic thought, originated in the US. Readers in the US need to understand not only how these elements of imperialism work, but also what people in countries like Bolivia are working toward as alternatives to neoliberalism. It is that building of a better world that is dealt with in this book; many lessons and helpful strategies for activists around the world can be found in these pages.

The centuries-old debates surrounding indigenous power, community and the re-founding of Bolivia to reflect its indigenous culture were rekindled after the passage of Bolivia’s new constitution in January of 2009. The changes in this constitution, along with much of the rhetoric and policies of the Morales administration, focus in part on empowering indigenous forms of decision making, governance, community justice, and social relations. Dispersing Power examines this ongoing process of decolonization by drawing from what indigenous societies and thinkers have been living, proposing, and working toward for centuries.

El Alto is currently far from a utopia; poverty, corruption, exploitation—the common challenges that plague many urban areas—are widespread in this city. But El Alto’s legacy of revolt lives on. The Gas War of 2003 was a transformative period partly because it drew from a history of indigenous and popular revolts. This book is an invaluable resource on a rebellion that deserves to be read about and researched extensively. Dispersing Power examines not only the roots of this uprising, but also the solidarity, collaboration, support networks, tactics, and strategies that were used by the people of El Alto, and others, to make their revolutionary work successful not only during the Gas War, but in everyday life.

In this sense, Dispersing Power is a wonderful example of Zibechi’s contributions to understanding social movements in Latin America. As one of the foremost writers and analysts on social movements in the region, Zibechi has influenced activists, social movement participants, writers, thinkers, and journalists around the globe. The nine books he has written have been translated into six different languages including French, Italian, Turkish, Greek, German, and now English. His articles have appeared in over a dozen languages, and he has given talks and participated in conferences in nearly twenty countries across Latin America, Europe, and beyond.

Zibechi’s analysis and focus resonates with a growing number of people concerned with social change from below. Central to much of his writing has been the anti-capitalist relations within movements; how territories of resistance and autonomy exist outside of dominant economic, political, and social models; popular assemblies, and community decision making, relations and actions that build a better world outside the taking of state power.

Like his writing, Zibechi’s activism, work, and experience has traversed much geographical and historical ground. As a student in Uruguay from 1969 to 1973, he was a participant of the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (Revolutionary Student Front), a student movement linked to the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Tupamaros (Tupamaros National Liberation Movement). He participated in movements against the dictatorship in Uruguay, and went into exile in Madrid, Spain in 1976, where he was active in the Communist Movement (a Maoist, feminist, and pacifist collective at the time) in rural literacy and anti-military work. In the 1980s he became acquainted first-hand with the liberation movements in Central America, and wrote for various newspapers including Página Abierta, Egin, Liberación and Página/12 in Argentina and Mate Amargo in Uruguay.

From 1986 onward he has traveled and worked throughout all of Latin America as a writer and activist. Zibechi is now an international analyst at one of the best weekly publications in Latin America, La Brecha, and regularly contributes to the Americas Program , La Jornada, and many other publications. In 2003, he won the José Marti Journalism Award for Genealogy of the Revolt, Argentina: Society in Movement, a book on the social movements in Argentina during that country’s uprising and crisis in 2001. He is the author of many books, including most recently, Territories in Resistance: Political Cartography of the Latin American Urban Peripheries. In addition, he is currently a lecturer and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina (Fransiscan Multiversity of Latin America), and participates in popular seminars on various topics with social movement groups around the region.

As readers, we are lucky that such a brilliant thinker is also an engaging and accessible writer. In an eloquent arrangement of history, theory, analysis, and reporting, Zibechi offers unique ways of understanding social change. The transformational capacity of his work is not limited to our perceptions; by presenting new ways of seeing, we’re also provided with fresh, empowering ways of changing the world we live in.

Zibechi artfully transmits the views of great philosophers, economists, and theorists to his work without bogging the writing down with academic jargon. In his articles and various books, whether writing about the Mapuche in Chile, the Zapatistas, or the Argentine piqueteros, unconventional sources are drawn from and under-reported news shared. His writing, like the movements he writes about, is horizontal and participatory; it draws predominantly from the voices and views of those most affected or involved.

Through much of his writing one feels a strain of hope; not some misleading tonic or pair of rose-colored glasses, but hope that embraces the challenges inherent in possibility, the work necessary for liberation, and the self-determination of people over parties, governments, and doctrines.

As Zibechi writes in Genealogy of the Revolt, To defend the new world implies expanding it, deepening it, enriching it. With the publication of Dispersing Power in English, this new world has expanded.

Foreword to the German edition

by John Holloway

If you think Bolivia is a far off country, forget it. Don’t bother to read this book. Better give it to a friend.

This is a book about you. About your hopes and fears, about the possibilities of living, even of surviving. De te fabula narratur, dear reader, and do not forget it as you plunge into the revolt in Bolivia.

Time has done a somersault. Bolivia used to be seen as a backward, underdeveloped country which could hope, if it was lucky, to attain the development of a country like Germany one day in the future. Perhaps even now there are some people who still think like that. But, as the disintegration of the capitalist world becomes more and more obvious, more and more frightening, the flow of time-hope-space is reversed. For more and more Europeans, Latin America has become the land of hope. And now, as we read of the movements in Bolivia, we say not poor people, have they any hope of catching up with us? but rather how wonderful! Can we in Germany (or wherever) possibly hope to do something like that? Can we ever aspire to act like the people of Cochabamba or El Alto? On the answer to this simple question hangs the future of the world.

There is a turn in the flow of inspiration and of understanding. This was announced by Subcomandante Marcos when, at the end of an interview for an Italian video in 1995, he was asked what Europeans could do to support the Zapatistas and he replied, the best thing you can do is revolt in your own countries and when we have finished here we shall come over and help you. But of course the flow of help and thought and inspiration has not had to wait for the successful completion of the Zapatista and other revolts in Latin America. The rebels of the world, but especially of Europe, have flocked to Chiapas, to Argentina, to Venezuela and to Bolivia, sometimes just to see and romanticize, but very often to admire, to help and above all to learn from the experiences there.

Raúl Zibechi goes to Bolivia to learn. Like us, he goes with questions, questions that stretch far beyond the borders of Bolivia. How do we change the world and create a different one? How do we get rid of capitalism? How do we create a society based on dignity? What is the role of the state and what are the possibilities of changing society through anti-state movements? What is an anti-state movement? What does anti-state mean in the details of everyday practice? Can an anti-state movement sustain itself over time without becoming institutionalized? How can we conceive of a community-based movement within the city? Not all of these questions are made explicit, but it is clear that Zibechi, an Uruguayan academic and journalist who has written very widely and influentially on the new wave of anti-systemic struggles in Latin America, takes with him all the most important practical and theoretical questions that have risen from the struggles in Latin America and the world in the last fifteen years or so. He takes these questions and brings them to life by examining them through the experience of El Alto, the Aymara city just outside La Paz which was the center of the social revolts of the first five years of this century.

Zibechi takes us to the city. This is important. The Zapatista movement here in Mexico has been an enormous source of inspiration in all the world for the last fifteen years. But the Zapatistas of Chiapas are peasants: they live basically by cultivating their own lands and they are supported by tightly knit communities. The question for us who are not peasants is how we create an urban Zapatismo. How can we create autonomous anti-capitalist, anti-state spaces or moments in the city? El Alto offers us many suggestions. One of the central arguments of Zibechi’s analysis is that the