Preface

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / Español

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 romanticise, 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 institutionalised? 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 centre 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 communities which served as the basis of the revolt in El Alto are not a reproduction of the rural communities from which many of the inhabitants came but a specifically urban phenomenon, forms of mutual support and collective organisation arising from the specific problems of living in a difficult urban environment.

These forms of support and organisation are woven in the practice of everyday life. Here is the real strength of the revolt. The real forces for social change are not where they appear to be. They are not in the institutions nor in the parties but in the daily contact between people, the daily weaving of social interactions that are not just necessary for survival but the basis of life. It is from this non-visible level that revolt arises, and the strength of the revolt will depend upon its remaining within that daily weaving of the community. The key to the success of the Bolivian revolt is that it is anti-state: not just in the sense that the people rose up against the state and stopped it from implementing its plans, but in the much more profound sense that it runs counter to the separation that the state embodies. Where the state separates people, separates leaders from masses, separates the political from the economic, the public from the private and so on, the struggle in Bolivia constantly resists this separation and binds all collective action firmly into the community. The struggle is the constant creation and recreation of the community – a crucial point too often forgotten by academics and activists.

Asymmetry is at the core of Zibechi’s story. We oppose capitalism by being unlike it, we fight the state by being something else. From the Bolivian experience we learn that this is realistic. The Bolivians overthrew the old regime not by elections, not by parties, but simply by pitching the strength of the community against that of the state. And this “something else” that we throw against capital, this community that we create and recreate through struggle, is potentially the embryo of another society. I say “potentially” because there is no certainty in this: Zibechi is very aware of the contradictions of the process and warns that the anti-state uprising, like so many revolutions before it, can end up strengthening the state it opposes. And yet, the study of El Alto shows us the force and everyday practicality of that other world that does not yet exist, and exists not yet, as struggle.

The future of humanity depends now on our being able to bring to life within the old, rotten and increasingly violent capitalism, flashes, intimations, anticipations, fragments of the world of dignity that we want to create. That is what the people of El Alto are doing and, by showing the way, they hurl a challenge at us.

The book is beautiful, exciting, stimulating: for me it is a great honour to be associated with it in this way. Do read it and also give it your friends.

John Holloway

Puebla, Mexico, 11 January 2009