[p2p-research] The revival and reconfiguration of communal systems in Latin America, and how they differ from the ‘commons’

[Michel Bauwens]

<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=6784>
full original at http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/decolonial/ ;
processed at
http://p2pfoundation.net/Communal_Systems_in_Central_and_South_America

in p2p blog on the 13th,

massimo, I'm processing  your distorted commons essay as well,

for extra background: http://p2pfoundation.net/Neotraditional_Economics

Michel

This idea of a communal system as an alternative to the (neo-)liberal system
today, which emerged from the memories and lived experiences of Andean
communities, has a global scope. This does not, however, mean that the ayllu
system should be exported in a manner similar to other, previous models
(Christian, liberal or Marxist). Rather, it is an invitation to organise and
re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that have been
erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy,
which the European left has been unable to halt. If
ayllus<http://p2pfoundation.net/Ayllu>and
markas <http://p2pfoundation.net/Marka_System> are the singular memory and
organisation of communities in the Andes, then it is the other memories of
communal organisation around the globe which predate and survived the advent
of capitalism which make possible the idea of a communal system today – one
not mapped out in advance by any ideology, or any simple return to the past.

Really brilliant article by Walter Mignolo in Turbulence
5<http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/decolonial/>,
explaining the underlying ideological and social underpinnings of what is
happening in Andean countries, especially Bolivia:

*Walter Mignolo <http://www.waltermignolo.com/>:*

*“The first civilisations to suffer the consequences of the formation and
expansion of Western civilisation were the Inca, the Aztec and the Maya. One
of these consequences was the dismantling of the communal system of social
organisation that some indigenous nations in Bolivia and Ecuador today are
working to reconstruct and reconfigure. From the European perspective, the
communal may sound like socialism or communism. But it is not. Socialism and
communism were born in Europe, as a response to liberalism and capitalism.
Not so the communal system. The communal systems in Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac
(Inca and Aztec territories, respectively), or societies in China before the
Opium War, eventually had to deal with capitalist and (neo-)liberal
intrusion, as well as European responses to such intrusions; but they
themselves pre-existed the capitalist mode of production.*

*A recent proposal to re-inscribe (not to recover or to turn back the clock
on) the communal into contemporary debates on pluri-national states is El
sistema communal como alternativa al sistema liberal [The Communal System as
an Alternative to the Liberal System], by Aymara sociologist Félix Patzi
Paco. There are others as well. Bolivian president Evo Morales’s speeches
are full of references to the communal, as are Nina Pacari’s, former
chancellor of Ecuador, who has been recently appointed secretary of foreign
affairs. So, too, is the collective work of the National Council of the
Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), a representative body of the
indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands. They feel no need to explain
these references, just as the Jacobins or the Paris Commune require little
elaboration for the European left.” *

*The Difference between the (native) Communal and the (left) Common*

*“This is a crucial point, as it highlights the difficulty of equating the
communal and the common. The latter is a keyword in the reorientation of the
European left today. And that should be no surprise: the idea of ‘the
common’ is part of the imaginary of European history. Yet the communal is
an-other story: it cannot be easily subsumed by the common, the commune or
communism. (Though this does not mean they cannot be put into conversation
with one another.)*

*The communal is not grounded on the idea of the ‘common’, nor that of the
‘commune’, although the latter has been taken up in Bolivia of late –
notably, not by Aymara and Quechua intellectuals, but by members of the
criolla or mestiza population. The communal is something else. It derives
from forms of social organisation that existed prior to the Incas and
Aztecs, and also from the Incas’ and Aztecs’ experiences of their 500-year
relative survival, first under Spanish colonial rule and later under
independent nation states. To be done justice, it must be understood not as
a leftwing project (in the European sense), but as a de-colonial one.” *

*Félix Patzi Paco’s Conception in Bolivia*

*“Félix Patzi Paco is a controversial figure in Bolivia, but an important
voice in the current process of thinking and working toward a pluri-national
state. Many criollo and mestizo intellectuals suspect that he works towards
the hegemony of the Aymara people. They argue that his project is not
pluri-national: first, its aim is to reverse the white (mestiza/criolla)
hegemony; and second, it ignores the many nations that currently exist in
the state of Bolivia, including other indigenous nations, as well as
organised peasant communities. The objection cannot easily be dismissed, for
it comes not from the right-wing of the low lands, but from many leftist
voices (generally whites, by South American standards) who are seriously
engaged in the construction of a pluri-national state. This suggests a
serious tension between the left, with its ingrained European traditions,
and de-colonial indigenous voices, which have a long history of
confrontation with European traditions. This tension has everything to do
with the differing genealogies of thought and practice from which concepts
like ‘the commons’ and ‘the communal’ originate.*

*Patzi Paco’s proposal, published in 2004, aims at a re-conceptualisation of
a ‘communal system’ as an alternative to the liberal system. For Patzi Paco,
sistema liberal refers to what subsists from the advent of the
modern/colonial state in Bolivia (and other regions of the non-Western
world), through the republics resulting from independence from Spain
(controlled by an elite of criollos and mestizos), up until the election of
Morales in December of 2005.*

*One of his motivations was to redress the image of indigenous nations
prevailing among social scientists, in Bolivia as elsewhere. He sought
instead to provide a vision of indigenous societies and nations that comes
from the history, knowledges and memories of indigenous people themselves.
As a sociologist, he is not rejecting the social scientific disciplines, and
particularly not sociology, but rather inverting his role in their
discourse. Instead of listening to the dictates of sociology, he uses
sociology to communicate and organise his argument. The result is a clear
case of border epistemology: the ability to speak from more than one system
of knowledge. This is important because the social sciences have been
instrumental in producing the marginalised conception of the indigenous.
Being able to speak in and from both systems of knowledge and language is
not a rejection of one in favour of the other, but an act of pluralising
epistemologies.*

*Patzi Paco’s main objection to disciplinary studies of indigenous nations
is that they limit their investigations to the common culture, the language
and the territorial space. What is usually bypassed or ignored, then, is
what for him is the ‘core’ of communal organisation – in the case of the
Andes, the ayllu, which we will examine later. In other words, most of what
we know about the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia concerns their ‘context’ or
‘environment’ (entorno), rather than the ‘core’ of their socio-economic
organisation. This is a critical distinction that Patzi Paco extends to the
uses of identity made by indigenistas (pro-indigenous non-indigenous) and
indianistas (indigenous engaged in a form of identity politics, identifying
with indigeneity through clothes, long hair and rituals). Both indigenistas
and indianistas operate at the level of the entorno, rather than that of the
two basic, core nodes of the communal system: economic and political
organisation. When they refer to the ayllu, it is as ‘territorial geographic
organisation’ (which is a state conception), rather than to the communal
systems of economic and political management.*

*It is on the latter that Patzi Paco’s proposal focuses. Its initial
question is: how to solve the paradox between the denial of indigenous
identity, on the one hand, and its reinforcement, on the other? He mentions
some positions among indianistas and indigenistas, who argue that a mental
revolution among Westernised indigenous people is necessary to solve the
paradox. Patzi Paco’s opinion is that this position is utopian, since it is
impossible to reverse the process when nations are traversed by global flows
(music, television, cinema, videos, internet, etc.). And it is not necessary
to reverse the transformation of the entorno: indigenous people can use
mobile phones and blue jeans in the same manner that white Europeans can
wear indigenous hats and costumes. No French or US tourist or scholar who
goes to the Andes and returns with indigenous paraphernalia changes their
identity and renounces capitalism in the process. So why should the
indigenous remain ‘indigenous’ in the way Westerners expect them to be? What
is crucial is not the changes in the surface (the entorno), but the
persistence of the core: the economic and socio-political and family
organisation of the ayllus.*

*That is what is at stake in Bolivia today in the construction of a
pluri-national state. The question is not one of who wears what clothes or
who gets to have phones. It’s about the conflictive co-existences of several
basic socio-economic organisations. These include: a mestizo and criollo
(liberal or Marxist) Western conception of the state; Aymara and Quechua
ayllus/markas (which CONAMAQ is working on), which exist both in the country
and in the city; other indigenous organisations in the lowlands; various
peasant organisations that are neither liberal, nor Marxist, nor
indianistas.*

*There is, according to Patzi Paco, an incongruence between the attention
paid to surface symbols of the indigenous (whether or not they have cell
phones or adapt symbols of non-indigenous culture), on the one hand, and the
lack of interest in the ayllu, on the other. Few have questioned the fact
that the ayllu has changed, but nevertheless remained as ayllu throughout
three hundred years of Spanish colonialism and two hundred years of Bolivian
republic. This would serve as indication that, while they may have
incorporated technologies and practices brought by Western modernisation,
many indigenous do not wish to become ‘modern’ in the sense of abandoning
their ways of living in harmony with the environment and in mutual respect
for their dignity.*

*The separation between ‘core’ and ‘entorno’ is essential for Patzi Paco,
and applies to all systems alike, including the liberal and the communal. At
their core, they are both organised and consolidated around two pillars:
economic and political/administrative management. The difference lies in the
type of economy and the political organisation, both constituted by two
types of entornos, or contexts, described as ‘internal’ and ‘external’. The
internal entorno is generated within the system itself, liberal or communal.
For example, in the 21st century mobile phones are intrinsic to the liberal
economy and way of life, while indigenous people ‘adapt’ them. Conversely,
the culture of Andean textile is internal to the communal system, and the
non-indigenous ‘adopt’ it. The problem emerges when the system – its core –
rather than the entorno is being affected by the incorporation of elements
from other systems. This is the case of the ‘indigenous bourgeoisie’, which
adopts capitalist principles concerning accumulation and the organisation of
labour. This indigenous bourgeoisie abandons the ayllu system and starts
exploiting the labour of other indigenous people. Because of the power
differential between them, the ayllu system is more easily affected by the
liberal system than it in turn affects the latter.*

*Crucial here is how both the system and the entorno are ‘coupled’,
according to the concepts of operational and structural coupling. Through
operational coupling, a system, communal or liberal, can appropriate
elements from the entorno of other systems. Thus, actors living by the rules
of a communal system can appropriate elements of the entorno of the liberal
system, such as technology. The liberal system can, by means of operational
coupling, appropriate elements from the communal, and include them alongside
the elements of the entorno internal to the liberal system. Acknowledging
this could help dispel the myth, among criollos and mestizos, that
contemporary indigenous societies are homogeneous. In fact, there are all
sorts of professional and class distinctions among them, and there are
indigenous proprietors who exploit indigenous labour. In a society where the
communal co-exists with the liberal system and a market economy, industry
owners have re-functionalised Andean reciprocity in order to obtain longer
working hours for low salaries – 12 hours a day instead of eight.*

*If all social organisations consist of a core and an environment (or
entorno), state multiculturalism’s rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ can be explained
as an attempt by the Bolivian state to co-opt the environment of the ayllu
while ignoring (or actively excluding) its core, that is, its political and
economic management. During the neo-liberal government of Sánchez de Losada
in the 1990s, the state spoke of the ‘pluri’ and the ‘multi’, meaning
pluri-lingual and multicultural. Patzi Paco’s book was published in 2004,
before Evo Morales was elected president. However, I suspect that a similar
critique of discourses of inclusion and ‘multiculturalism’ could be applied
to the ‘Latin left’ in power today. This is certainly CONAMAQ’s critique of
Evo Morales, that is, of the left that now predominates in the Bolivian
government. The reconstitution of ayllus and markas, which is CONAMAQ’s
project, is precisely in response to the danger of being co-opted. Here
resides the second strong motivation to bring to the foreground the communal
system and to confront it as an alternative option to the liberal system.*

*But what exactly, then, is the communal? Patzi Paco refers to collective
rights to the use and management of resources, at the same time as he speaks
of the rights of groups, families and individuals to share in the benefits
of what is collectively produced. He makes clear that, while the communal
has its ancestral foundation in agrarian societies in the Andes, these
characteristics have survived and adapted well to contemporary conditions.
The communal system is open to ‘persons’, indigenous or not, as well as to
different types of ‘work’: in a communal system the distinction between
owner and waged worker, as well as boss and employee in administrative
organisations (banks, state organs, etc.), vanishes. To understand the scope
of this proposal, it is necessary to clear our heads of the ‘indigenous =
peasants’ equation that the coloniality of knowledge has imposed upon us,
alongside the rhetoric of ‘salvation’. Moreover, the notion of ‘property’ is
meaningless in a vision of society in which the goal is working to live and
not living to work. It is in this context that Evo Morales has been
promoting the concept of ‘the good living’ (sumaj kamaña in Quechua, sumak
kawsay in Quichua, allin kausaw in Aymara or buen vivir in Spanish). ‘The
good living’ – or ‘to live in harmony’ – is an alternative to ‘development’.
While development puts life at the service of growth and accumulation, buen
vivir places life first, with institutions at the service of life. That is
what ‘living in harmony’ (and not in competition) means.*

*Patzi Paco’s conceptualisation of the communal system cannot be thought of
as a replacement of the current modern/nation-state – that would result not
in a pluri-national state, but only a mono-national state with a different
configuration. The proposal is not to replace the Bolivian
liberal/(neo-)colonial state founded after independence from Spain with the
Incan Qullasuyu. Yet the reconstitution of the ayllus and markas of the
Qullasuyu is fundamental to understanding what a pluri-national state – the
idea of which is already inscribed in the new constitutions of Bolivia and
Ecuador – may mean. The crucial difference here lies in the fact that the
de-colonial project – to decolonise the state, education, language and
economy – not only has a different genealogy of thoughts and memories to
that of the ‘European’ (or, colonial) left of non-European regions; its way
of transforming reality is also distinct.*

*This idea of a communal system as an alternative to the (neo-)liberal
system today, which emerged from the memories and lived experiences of
Andean communities, has a global scope. This does not, however, mean that
the ayllu system should be exported in a manner similar to other, previous
models (Christian, liberal or Marxist). Rather, it is an invitation to
organise and re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that
have been erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the
capitalist economy, which the European left has been unable to halt. If
ayllus and markas are the singular memory and organisation of communities in
the Andes, then it is the other memories of communal organisation around the
globe which predate and survived the advent of capitalism which make
possible the idea of a communal system today – one not mapped out in advance
by any ideology, or any simple return to the past. The Zapatista dictum of
the need for ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ springs to mind as we try to
imagine a planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal,
world order.*

*It is for this reason that Patzi Paco’s proposal of the communal should
figure in the discussion for a pluri-national state. The left, with its
European genealogy of thought, cannot have the monopoly over the right to
imagine what a non-capitalist future shall be. There are many non-capitalist
pasts that can be drawn from, many experiences and memories that perhaps do
not wish to be civilised – neither by the right nor by the left. The
progressive left’s ignoring of Patzi Paco’s proposal may end up as an excuse
to prevent indigenous and peasant leaders and communities from intervening
in de-colonising the current mono-cultural state – which the white
(criolla/mestiza) right and left continue to fight over.” *


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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