Popular Self-Management, Social Intervention and Utopistics in the Capitalist World-System.

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 Ignacio Muñoz Cristi[2]

 

Abstract:

My purpose in this presentation is to reflect on Popular Self-Management and Social Intervention, not as disciplines or objectifying definitions, but rather as relational dynamics that form an integral part of the history of the Capitalist World-System. To do this I will point out the generative role they played in the making of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the different ways the concepts have been mobilized by a variety of ideologues, social scientists and anti-systemic social movements, on the other. We will see two parallel and contradictory tendencies that manifest themselves at the present historical juncture and form part of the current structural crisis of the modern world-system, in light of and against which anti-systemic social movements the world over have been exploring fresh solutions.  I will take a particularly close look at those proposed by the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle (Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha - MPL) in Chile. In conclusion, we will articulate some perspectives on the challenges and desirability of strengthening collaborative ties between social intervention and popular self-management, pointing to the possibility, in the medium- and long-term, of developing a post-capitalist world-system relatively more egalitarian and democratic than our current one.

 

 

Key Words:

Popular Self -Management, Social Intervention, Anti-systemic Movements, Utopistics.

 

 

 

 

 

Primary Research Goals

I aim to theorize social intervention and popular self-management

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without becoming trapped in rigid definitions that artificially separate dynamics that, though autonomous, operate together within a common matrix.  To see these related phenomena in the vastness of their complexity, to harmonize their contradictory polarities, requires that we stop conceiving of them as specific, enclosed disciplines or modes of praxis, and instead open ourselves to a mode of historical and global analysis that widens the range of possible comparisons and distinctions and allows us to understand social intervention and popular self-management as relational dynamics that are constitutive parts of the global resistance to Capitalist Modernity. 

 

As we will see, the French Revolution, from the perspective of World-Systems Analysis, was the origin of both the anti-capitalist relational matrix and the liberal matrix, which beginning in 1848 until 1968 came to be the two principle tendencies of geoculture under capitalism (Wallerstein, 1998a).  Because of this the French Revolution can be seen as generative of the practices of popular self-management and social intervention and the three institutions that operationalized these practices, each for their own specific ends, to wit: Ideologies, Social Sciences, and Anti-Systemic Movements.

 

It is important, then, to comprehend popular self-management and social intervention in their specific difference as well as in their common background, to stress that two historic tendencies have evolved alongside one another, contradictory and intertwined, simultaneously cyclical and progressive, tendencies and contradictions that manifest themselves today as a sort of knot or bind, forming part of the contemporary and final crisis of the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein, 2010).  Facing these tendencies and contradictions, anti-systemic movements from around the globe are responding by exploring new strategies of resistance and liberation.

 

The specific background from which we articulate the various elements of this investigative report, is the utopistic problem (Wallerstein, 1998b)

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of the civilizational transition, and more specifically, the great difficulty which, again according to Wallerstein (1998c), anti-systemic movements have met with up to now in resisting the instrumentalization and cooptation that plague aspiring leaders who come to serve as movement directives, and which have repeatedly managed to demobilize the antisystemic flow.

 

This historical failing has, as we will see, propelled a strategic change on the part of many anti-systemic movements.  In addition to the continued search for the means for taking state power, the formation of neighborhood assemblies and other forms of territorial organizations have taken a central role in the construction of popular power, where the role of self-education has taken on a central role.

In order to take a closer look into the complexity of a specific practice of popular community self-management, one that incorporates elements of social intervention and puts them in the service of an anti-systemic socio-political project, during a time in which anti-systemic movements are undergoing an autonomist turn (Thawaites, 2004), we will examine fundamental aspects of the historical project of the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle (MPL) and the three-pronged strategy its members have developed in order to realize it.  MPL is a popular urban movement in Chile that arose in the periphery of the Santiago in 2006, and forms part of an anti-systemic front that in the present cycle is changing the face of popular movements in Chile in an adverse setting characterized by profound de-politicization where the neoliberal ideology cultivated by elites for over forty years now has taken root, psychologically and culturally.

 

By way of conclusion, we will examine perspectives related to the difficulties and desirability of strengthening collaborative ties between anti-systemic social interventionists and popular self-managers, looking to the possibility, in the long-term (40-50 years), of advancing and inhabiting an emergent post-capitalist world-system relatively more equal and democratic than the current, capitalist one.

 

This text is organized into five parts: 1) The Capitalist World-System and the Normalcy of Political Change; 2) A possible Periodization of Tendencies in Social-interventionist and Popular Self-Managerial Dynamics; 3) Of World Crisis, Experts, Cooptation, and Class Struggle; 4) The Historic Political Project for Dignified Life (Vida Digna) and the Three-pronged Strategy of the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle; 5) Utopistics Conclusions: From the World-System, Without and Against it.

1) The Capitalist World-System and the Normalcy of Political Change:

I will begin by specifying, based on criteria developed by World-Systems Analysts (Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, et al), what we mean by Capitalist World-System as a historically situated system of coexistence, and I will do so highlighting eight fundamental characteristics of its concrete operation.  It is a vision that contrasts with other conceptions of capitalism that see it as a mere mode of production, considering it to be, instead, a historical system that falls on a scale defined by long durations of time, and global rather than statist conceptions of social development.  In this way, historical capitalism appears as a composite of, at least, eight central elements: 1) A structural orientation, focusing on networks of capitalist relations whose primary goal is the incessant accumulation of capital, a compulsive drive that represents a fundamental force in the shaping of modern life; 2) Origins in the 16^th Century in Western Europe and part of the Americas; 3) A single market that organizes the worldwide division of labor differentially in a center, semi-periphery and periphery and generates an unequal exchange based on progressive commercialization and the formation of quasi-monopolies (Wallerstein, 2004a); 4) A political correspondence between a world economy and an interstate system in which States with varying degrees of power find themselves in continuous political and military struggles and economic competition (Wallerstein, 2001a); 5) The historic existence of tree cycles of global State hegemony and the struggles to establish it (Wallerstein, 2004b); 6) A continuous process of appropriation of the surplus-value generated by global economic operations in which three main actors participate, and where the middle stratus exploits the lower and is exploited by the upper.  This class structure is permanently being destroyed and recreated by the contradictions of the system; 7) The rise of anti-systemic movements that have historically debilitated and simultaneously reinforced the world-system; 8) A Eurocentric, sexist and racist hegemonic world-mentality that falls in stark contradiction with a foundational inspiration that is anti-authoritarian and egalitarian (Wallerstein, 2004c).

 

From this optic, we consider it to be a myth that capitalism arises with the industrial revolution in England in the 19^th Century, and also that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, or a merely antiauthoritarian one in which a new class, the bourgeoisie, would arise between feudal lords and peasants.  Rather, it is a history of how lords were forced by events to transform themselves into bourgeoisie in order to conserve their privileges as governors.  On the other hand, the historical importance of the French Revolution that this perspective highlights (Wallerstein, 1998a), has to do with what it triggered in the rest of the world, beyond France, propelling a profound geocultural transformation in which the greatest change effected had to do with a new consciousness or mentality, one that accepts the normalcy of political change and whose two main were: 1) the distinction that national sovereignty is not immanent to the State but is located, rather, in the mobilization of the organized peoples, and 2) the progressive opening of the category of citizenship (and suffrage) toward ever greater universality.

 

In this scenario, the capitalist stratum the world over came to accept that constant political change had come to stay, and understood that only by accepting that fact would they be able to contain and retard said change.  Once this new mindset or governing strategy had become more generalized, during the period from 1789 to 1848, three new institutions arose as expression of and answer to this new “normalcy of change”: ideologies, social sciences, and anti-systemic movements, which together constitute the main cultural and intellectual force of the long 19^th Century (Wallerstein, 1998c).

1.a) Ideologies:

Though we may not customarily think of ideologies as institutions, from this perspective (Wallerstein, 1996a) they are in as much as they allude to concrete political programs and the national and international structures that create and conserve them.  That is, in every era there have been world views that encompass distinct ways of interpreting human existence, but an ideology is a world view which in addition has been consciously and collectively formulated in order to meet specific political objectives, having accepted that change in general and political change in particular had come to be expected.  Perhaps it was the psychic-cultural stamp of the modern world-system which provoked this change.

 

Among the three major ideologies in the world the were developed in the 19th Century – Conservatism, Liberalism and Radicalism (Marxism and Anarchism) – Liberalism came to be the natural ideology of normal change, that attempts to control and canalize change, but it had to become an ideology as such only after the rise of Conservatism.  Of course the idea that the right which individuals enjoy to free themselves from the impositions of the State precedes the 19^th Century, but here we see something different: a complex reform program that was consciously and bureaucratically developed.

 

Conservatism for its part attempted to intellectually and pragmatically justify the slowest possible rhythm of change, and assumed that some changes were dangerous and objectionable than others.  It aimed to preserve tradition, specifically: the monarchy, the family, and the church.

 

Finally, both of the two main lines of Radicalism, Marxism and Anarchism, were the last ideologies to come on the scene in a pragmatic way.  They did so with the worldwide revolution of 1848.  Marxism accepted the basic premise of Liberalism – the inevitability of progress – but it added two distinct elements: 1) that progress did not happen in a continuous but rather a discontinuous manner, through revolution(s); and 2) that the evolutionary path of human life had not achieved its peak with capitalist modernity but rather there remained a final stage to be realized and as such change had to be accelerated as much as possible.

 

For its part, Anarchism did not always share the notion of inevitable progress, but it shared with Marxism the perception that political change had to be accelerated to the greatest degree possible, and it sought to develop structures that would allow for the conservation of political change oriented toward the maximization of the autonomy of individuals and communities.

 

In this way, the three ideologies specified, variously, how normal change was to be confronted (Wallerstein, 1996a).

 

1.b) The Social Sciences:

In as much as political agendas implied pragmatic proposals for intervention in the social realities of the era, it was necessary to acquire pragmatic knowledge about those realities, and so the social sciences were born.  Evidently, there were social thinkers far before this period, but the social sciences are more than mere social thought, and just as ideologies which differed from previous world views, social sciences were generated by collectives of people and from within specific structures that pursued specific ends.  Their institutionalization in the 19^th Century involved the empirical study of the social world so as to understand the dynamics of “normal change” and so wield influence in the nature of that change (Wallerstein, 1998a).

 

Social sciences have maintained an ambiguous relationship to social politics.  During the middle of the 19^th Century, the first organizations that formed to promote these disciplines were not located in the universities but in the public sphere, and they brought together not only academics but also people who were active in the political arena, businessmen and members of the clergy.  Their fundamental proposal was to propel reforms aimed at solving the so-called “social question” (which was a product of overcrowding in emerging urban centers and manufacturing districts characteristic of the new economy).  Toward the end of the 19^th Century, they had institutionalized the social-scientific disciplines then in vogue, and divided them according to concerns of the triumphant liberal ideologies of the day, which since 1848 had formed the backbone of dominant cultural trends in the world-system (Wallerstein, 1996a).  It was argued that modern human existence could be divided into three spheres of activity: the market, the State, and the personal-social. 

 

From the study of these three emerged new scientific disciplines: economics, political science, and sociology.  And these Western disciplines sustained the idea that there existed a civilized and an uncivilized world, a notion which colored the way Western social scientists wrote the histories and anthropological studies of “backward” nations and their own Western ancestors.  And form a reductionist perspective (biological and mental), psychology tended to see itself as part of the natural sciences, and academic departments dedicated to its study tended to be placed in medical schools.  In some cases psychology remained as a sub-department of sociology (Wallerstein, 1996b).  Each discipline was accompanied by a field of applied sciences dedicated to social “engineering.”  These were largely developed outside of the Academy, but were strongly influenced by its disciplinary compartmentalization, empiricist orientation, pretensions of neutrality, and tendency to rely on national (rather than global) source material.  The study of social change was restricted by these epistemological blinders and instrumentalized to serve the needs of the dominant classes, which robbed them of emancipator potential (Wallerstein, 1996b).

 

1.c) Anti-Systemic Movements:

Those who looked to move beyond the limits configured by the liberally oriented world relied on a third institution: Anti-Systemic Movements.  Obviously rebellions and opposition to authority were nothing new to history, but just as world views and social thought transformed into ideologies and social sciences, respectively, so resistance movements took on a new character.  No longer merely spontaneous and locally coordinated uprisings, anti-systemic movements were authentic organizations dedicated to planning and executing a politics of social transformation and projected themselves in the middle- and long-term.  These movements followed one of two main paths: those which were organized around the popular classes (like the proletariat, for instance) were called social movements, and those which were organized around the people understood as a nation, which came to be known as nationalist movements (Arrighi, Hopkins &Wallerstein, 1999; Wallerstein 2003a).

 

Describing the process of institutionalization that these movements underwent and that eventually converted them into State-run organizations requires more space than the present study affords.  Suffice it to say that just as the other two new institutions previously mentioned, the very same anti-systemic movements participated in the dynamic that generated the reining-in and distortion of the historic process of political change.  This is to say that, in the long run, they were both part of the solution and part of the problem.

 

Upon finding themselves to be constrained by the inter-State system once they had achieved Sate power (the thrill of total State sovereignty), they then confronted the many challenges that attempting to develop a national economy while remaining inserted in a capitalist world-economy where the largest share of real power lies not within the State machinery but rather in the domain of productive resources which were principally held in the hands of transnational corporations.  Nevertheless, we should take into account that at the end of the 19^th and during the first half of the 20^th Centuries anti-systemic movements won victory after victory, up until the 1950’s when these movements were conquered the world over by their respective bourgeois States.

 

Anti-systemic movements fell into three main categories: communism, social democracy, and movements for national liberation.  As the 1960’s approached, a large portion of these movements had already passed the stage of mobilization and had formed governments.  And that’s when it came time to pay their bills.  According to their own initial goals, they all failed.  This became evident all over the world with the so-called world revolution of 1968 (Wallerstein, 2004d), which gave rise to anti-systemic movements of a new sort and opened up space for movements which had previously been rendered invisible (feminist and ethnic movements, for example).  These delivered the first major blow to liberal world culture that established itself on the ideology of progress, or more specifically, developmentalism administered by nominal experts.  Indeed, the rupture of ’68 involved an attack against North American capitalist hegemony, but it also involved a series of effective volleys against the collusion of the traditional left-wing parties and movements.

 

Movements of the old left achieved a variety of concessions: political independence, nationalization of basic resources, the development of infrastructure, and even a certain collective political influence on the world stage.  And we could say that the middle class urban strata benefitted greatly.  But the fundamental complaints of the popular classes had become unavoidably concrete, and in the final term, destructive.

 

Now then, at the very moment when this cultural revolution of 1968 arrived on the scene, the old debate from the world revolution of 1848 reared its head: Take State power, or follow the path of autonomous construction that the former could neither control nor destroy?  A hot debate in the final third of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th Century, no doubt, and one that it is possible to detect in the countries of the center in the confrontation between marxists and anarchists, and in the periphery with the discussion between political and cultural nationalists, debate that has its technical correlative in the arguments for and against social intervention and popular self-management.  Nevertheless, a world history of the diverse autonomist experiments that took place between 1970 and 1994 would show a long list of new failures, given that, in general, they split due to strategic differences and many came to participate, in a various ways, in State politics, and were constrained by the same contradictions that had plagued their predecessors (Wallerstein, 2006).  Of course, the new left also had its successes: it’s enough to mention the concessions granted to ecological, feminist, ethnic and sexual dissident movements in the world.

Facing this global situation, anti-systemic movements of a new sort have been arising since the middle of the 90’s, movements like the new Zapatistas in Mexico (Aguirre Rojas Ed., 2001), the Alter-Globalization Movement (González Casanova, 2004), the World Social Forum (Wallerstein, 2013), the Landless Workers’ Movement in brazil (Stedile, 2003), the combative rural indigenous communities of Bolivia (Quispe, 2006), Peru and Ecuador (Santi, 2008), the Popular Movement for Dignity in Argentina (MPLD, 2013), and in Chile the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle (Muñoz, 2014).  All of these have characteristics that differentiate them from previous movements, like the cardinal fact that they are societies in movement more than political associations of the working class.  Among the characteristics they share we would like to highlight: the re-politicization of the social and the re-socialization of the political, where direct participation and horizontality in organizational spaces through popular assemblies is the common modus operandi.  Another characteristic is the radical rejection of the paradigm of progress, not only disbelieving this paradigm but also raising an alternative framework centered on, for example, popular self-management of Dignified Living

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, where sustainable development is not even aspired to but rather a mode of life based on social well-being and collaboration in the realization of a common, democratic and egalitarian project.  There is also a very clear transition made from being movements limited by the State to being movements oriented toward the world.  Even Indigenous peoples and landless workers’ movements are organizing themselves globally.  These forms of cooperation reveal a tendency to bypass the dilemma posed by past movements with respect to achieving emancipation without associating the attainment of equality and liberty merely through the taking of State power.

 

Two other enormous advances are in evidence in comparison to 1968.  First, the recognition that gender, racial and class inequalities are organized and strengthened by the global division of labor, which demands controversial cooperation between the Global North and South.  And secondly, that the struggle for equality and liberty demand we confront local as well as global processes (Lee, Martin, Sonntag, Taylor, Wallerstein & Wieviorka, 2005).

 

2) A Possible Periodization of the Tendencies of Social Interventionism and Popular Self-Managerial Dynamics:

Next we will specify some points related to the contradictory tendencies in the interweaving histories of Social Intervention and Popular Self-Management, understanding these as relational dynamics which have been and are operationalized in diverse and complex ways by one or more of the three institutions we discussed previously, an underlying cause from which certain contradictions between their related histories emerge, and blur the lines of distinction between their respective operational borders.

 

2.a)  In a possible periodization of the history of Social Intervention, opening this conceptually to understand it in its broadest sense, we can distinguish two contradictory and parallel currents.  One, from 1815 to 1945, that is fundamentally authoritarian and is directly related to the formation of nation-states: obligatory military service and public education, imposition of a national language, reconfiguration of the metropolis, colonial intervention in the name of civilization, etc.  The second current, which runs from 1945 to 1968, involves a massive opening up of space for social intervention by non-governmental organizations with a more participative technical orientation that seeks to repair the ethical-technical breach.  There is a third current that runs from 1968 to the present, in which the epistemological correlative of the structural crisis of the world-system generates a general discussion about the foundations of science itself and its applied fields (Wallerstein, 1996b: Iñiguez, 2003).  This has resulted in the organization of critical, reflexive and complex practices of social intervention (González, 2012: Alfaro, 2007) that recognizes itself to be in permanent tension with praxis (González, Castillo, 2007), and even, according to some theorists (Stecher, 2007) swinging back-and-forth between impotence and omnipotence.  This latest current in social-interventionist praxis has, in many cases, not only increased the degree of popular participation in the construction of social projects but also openly aspires to a global anti-systemic politics.  This is the case with, for example, certain latin american social psychologists who have developed a theory-practice of Psychology for Liberation (Martín-Baró, 1986; Burton, 2013), popular educators (Freire, 1967) and social workers since the period from 1960-1973 known as the re-conceptualization (Dupont, 1971: Parra, 2004).

 

On the other hand, it is fitting to mention an opposite line of development that runs parallel to these progressivist developments since the 1970’s until the present day, one which has demonstrated a tendency toward global and omnipotent imposition where political, military, and commercial interventions are made by a select group of powerful elites in the name of development and democracy.  A wide-array of interventions that undergird a marked abandonment of working peoples and their interests, emphasizing instead bourgeois concepts such as national development, national social sciences, and national-socialist politics.  The contraction of the State has advanced progressively.  In the Global North, States have emphatically given up on their liberal promises (Wallerstein, 1996b), and in Latin America, Africa, and Asia a forceful abandonment of planning for development has occurred.  The decadence of formerly strong syndicalist, socialist and nationalist movements from the middle of the 20^th Century facilitated the transition to a neoconservative era, erroneously referred to as neoliberal.  The immense magnitude of the global uprisings that in 1968 shook the complacency of the liberal consensus, in spite of the triumph of certain attacks made against historic inequalities related to race, gender, and ecological problems, did not manage to halt this conservative tendency.  On the contrary, the attack they’ve made against the State and the older social movements that came to be plagued by corruption, strengthened even more the loss of legitimacy that State structure, political parties, social-political planners, and social interventionists have suffered during this period.

 

Social Intervention, then, from the perspective we’re developing here, include every kind of process in which the State, political parties, business groups, and civil society have developed with the explicit intention of carrying out transformations in diverse areas of human existence.  These interventions are justified variously, usually arguing for an supposed improvement in the conditions of life, however, implicitly, every single change attempted by actors who fall within this tradition have conserved one thing by effecting or attempting to effect transformations with this top-down methodology.

 

Here we would like to invite a change of perspective with respect to how we view processes of change, emphasizing the insoluble entanglement between dynamics of change and conservation.  As Humberto Maturana (1975; 2000) has pointed out in relation to the dynamic of the spontaneous formation of systems, that with Dávila (Maturana & Dávila, 2009a: 149) later reformulated as one of the Fundamental Systemic Laws

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: “When in a set of elements certain kinds of relations begin to conserve, a space opens up in such a way that everything changes around these relations that begin to conserve.”  It should be mentioned that everything changes around something that is conserved and that therefore there are two kinds of change: one that changes while conserving systemic relations, and another that produces changes that are transformative of previously established systemic relations and provoke the disintegration of the system, allowing for something new to arise.  In this way, we can perceive that even critical and ethically-oriented social interventions have effected transformations that might benefit specific populations locally, which is always important, but that on a global scale end up falling within flow of processes that conserve the relational dynamics of the capitalist world-system, which at the end of the day are the source of the “problems” that social interventionists aim to solve.

 

2.b) It is in the world revolution of 1848 (Wallerstein, 1998c), with the attendant emergence of anti-systemic movements, that we can situate the origin of popular self-management of a communitarian and autonomist nature.  These, taking into account the oppression and repression of the State and working in favor of the proletarian classes, faced the pertinent question: How do we situate ourselves strategically in relation to this State?  And the dilemma consisted of two options: Take State power or; Construct popular power outside of the State in such a way that this could neither control nor destroy it.

 

After the popular self-managerial icon that the Paris Commune came to be had been bloodily defeated, the strategy that came into full force during the 20^th Century was the conquest of State power.  Popular self-management was a tactical tool of secondary importance until at least 1968.

In Chile at the beginning of the 20^th Century, we have the examples of mutual societies and mancomunales

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which aimed to establish the popular self-government of communities by taking control of municipal government.  The last of these mega-structures were dismantled around 1925 and never came back into force again after that date (Salazar, 2012).

Nevertheless, on intimate scales, on the margins of the law and flowing through the subterranean rivers of the histories of popular movements, dynamics of popular self-management (popular land grabs, occupational workshops, community dinners, popular education, etc.) always remained active, since these were, quite plainly, strategies of survival.  Popular self-management is, in many cases, a question of life or death (Salazar, 2009).

 

Turning our unit of analysis again to the world at large, from 1968 until 1994 the dynamic of popular self-management grew in breadth and strength, but it remained weak and shaky in the face of its contradictory relations with the dynamics of the State and the world market.  And since the Zapatista uprising in 1994 we can take note of a period marked by the strategic strengthening of practices of popular community self-management, as well as a deepening of critical theoretical frameworks related to these practices internationally, in such a way that popular self-management begins to be conceived as a process of recovery of the capacity of collective and territorial self-determination that entails the continuous dispute of political and economic power against the hegemonic strata which monopolizes them, locally and globally (SELVIP, 2011).  All of which is to say that popular self-management does not merely involve the management of the few or many resources that are at hand, but rather self-government, the social production of habitat, equitable redistribution of the means of production – all as part of an intentional process that explicitly aims to de-mercantilization of human existence.

On the other hand, this historical tendency gives birth to another with the Russian Revolution of 1917, where after repressing and decimating communitarian-centered anarchist processes of popular self-management, the State generates a process of domestication in which a kind of State-sponsored popular self-management is created and promoted by the government.  It is implemented from the top down in such a way that the State decrees the appropriation of the means of production or the taking of decisions, but within the limits that the line promoted by the government defines.  In Tito’s Yugoslavia we find another example of this, which had global repercussions, influencing cases like that of Peru from 1968 to 1975 and, up to a point, in the industrial arena, that of Chile between 1967 and 1973 (Razeto, 1983).

 

Alongside this tendency, beginning in the 1970’s and up until today, there begins to appear a relational current that we could qualify as neoliberal popular self-management, where, in the domain of the private enterprise, the “empowerment” of people and professional teams is incentivized and the dynamics of autonomy and collaboration fail to take hold.  These processes are imposed surreptitiously by upper management in order to increase productivity and decrease costs, and carefully avoid politicizing the work place with class consciousness (Sennett, 2006).  In professional and commercial sectors, this sort of practice has been taken to the extreme in the promotion of the individual as entrepreneur of her or his own life, and has strongly influenced the depoliticized character of a variety of small-scale popular self-management projects, which, while remaining communitarian at least in theory or stated intent, fail to conserve in the long term collective, community power.

 

There has also arisen, in this same period, a neoliberal, governmental tendency to legally and fiscally sponsor the popular self-management of poor communities in such a way that they are “left to their own devices,” the focus being not on rights but rather on meritocracy and in hyper-targeting of subsidies.

 

2.c)  With this schematic periodization of the contradictory tendencies that the relational dynamics of social intervention and popular self-management have followed historically, we have developed an epistemological conception of each to distinguish one from the other without relying on dry definitions, nor considering them to be academic disciplines or technical praxes, but rather by abstracting from what for an observer are regularities of historical experience, that come into view from the study of the historiography of the modern world.  From the latter one deduces that social intervention includes any kind of operation and relation in which the State and/or the interstate system, political parties, business groups, clubs and organizations of the civil society, and even anti-systemic movements intervene in the social life of one or more communities or territories which are most frequently poor, sometimes middle-class, and never wealthy.  In the same way, it is never the periphery of the world-system that intervenes in the center.  This profile places the social interventionist practices squarely within the Gordian knot of the decolonial and class struggles.

 

On the other hand, popular self-management understood as a relational dynamic includes any kind of operation or process in which a community bringing forth and manages by itself transformations in its own social life.  These can, however, be mediated or even instrumentalized by the State, business groups, non-governmental organizations, allied anti-systemic movements, etc., always with the class and decolonial struggles in the background.

In this way, the mutual distinction that comes into view when one attends to social intervention and popular self-management allows us to draw the lines that define the operational and relational dynamics specific to each one as they course through the historical drift of the capitalist world-system.

 

3)  On Civilizational Crisis, Experts, Cooptation, and the Class Struggle:

Upon treating the identity of the modern world-system from the criterion of its functioning as a capitalist world-economy, and attending to its concrete historical drift over the last five hundred years, we can distinguish that its basic organizational features, as relate both to the functioning of it component parts and its existence as a totality, operate according to certain specific dynamics of continuous accumulation of capital

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.  If we think of these as dynamics of a complex homeostatic system, it allows us to perceive that they function in such a way as to conserve invariably at their center endless accumulation, through the progressive mercantilization of everything and the quasi-monopolies of the networks of worldwide mercantile chains (Wallerstein, 2004a).  However, as happens with any dynamic system that exists in an equally dynamic and discreet environment, the conditions of possibility, both for the conservation of its organization (the composite functioning of its distinct components) and for the conservation of its structural coupling (Maturana, 2009b) in the environment which gives rise to its existence (its operating as totality).  Each of these turns out to be unsustainable, incapable of assuring their own conservation due to the changes that the system sets off first in the surrounding environment and subsequently in the functioning of its human components, as well as the changes that the system triggers, variously, in its human components and vice versa, carrying it toward the brink of disintegration or, what amounts to the same, its transformation into another kind of system or kinds of systems.

 

As Wallerstein (2010) signals, and in synthesis, what has produced the actual situation in which the capitalist world-economy is moving so far from the conditions of possibility that conserve it, is that, on the hand, during the course of 500 years the three basic costs of the production of capital: salaries, raw materials and taxes (in relation, respectively, to urbanization, ecological crisis, and democratic demands) have risen continuously as a percentage of the possible sales prices, in such a way that today it has become impossible to conserve the high profits of quasi-monopolistic production, which has always been the basis of capitalist accumulation.  This is not happening, then, because capitalism is failing in its dynamic of accumulation, but rather, exactly because it has been accumulating so efficiently that it has begun to mine the conditions of possibility for future accumulations.

On the other hand, the pressures generated by anti-systemic movements, progressively more diverse and intense ever since the world revolution of 1968, are fueling the systemic crisis and the destruction and transformation of the old structures of knowledge.  Historically, what happens when similar conjunctures of terminal crisis are reached is that historical systems of daily life enter into a highly chaotic relational turbulence from which one or more new kinds of social systems arise, systems which tend to preserve some of the structural features of the previous system.  This is the dynamic in which our world-system is currently caught, ever since the decade of the 70s, an in which it will remain for at least some 20 or 40 years (Hopkins &Wallerstein, 2005).

 

So, we will not refer merely to an economic crisis, these are quite normal cyclically in the history of capitalism.  Instead we will refer to a terminal crisis with economic, political, ecological and epistemological dimensions.  Now, if we can well assert that the present system will not survive, there is no way to predict what new order will replace it, given that this will be the result of an infinity of individual and collective processes and pressures and which, additionally, occur in disjunctive domains.  Which is to say that it will not be a capitalist system, but it could be one that is worse – even more authoritarian, exploitative and polarizing –, or it could be one that is more desirable in terms of equality and democracy.

 

Here it is important to point to the distinction that Samir Amin (1980; 2001b) has made with respect to the history of the previous transitions of which we have record: that of Western antiquity to feudalism and that of feudalism to capitalism.  The latter transition was controlled (by the governing feudalist strata) and the former transition was more chaotic and was experienced as a disintegration or decadence of the ancient world.  As Wallerstein (1998c) points out, if said process of chaotic disintegration can seem at first glance to be undesirable, it isn’t when we consider that only in this way the possible conditions open up sufficiently to allow for a transition that does not result in the conservation of dynamics that preserve privileges and inequities, since governing strata benefit from the status quo and justify the supposed necessity of control, they would likely act in such a way as to conserve their privileges in the transition to the new system.  This reflection will be fundamental, as we will see, in relation to the discussion which we will engage further on with respect to the effective historical alternatives [to capitalism] on which anti-systemic movements can rely in the current period of transition.

 

The aforementioned economic pressure, increasingly evident today, implies a political pressure that is leading to serious conflicts between the upper classes, both between and within nation-states.  This is made more severe because the range of redistribution at the height of the system has increased, as has the insistent solicitants who would claim a greater share – among these last the BRICS countries.  There are three groups competing at the heights of the system for a bigger piece of the pie: the super-accumulators, the bulk cadres, and the aspirant cadres (Wallerstein, 1998c: 30).

 

On the other hand, concessions and cooptation have been fundamentally directed in modern history not toward the working majorities of the world, but rather toward the bulk cadres and the middle classes, this, paradoxically, thanks to the revolutionary efforts of the lower strata that have driven forward diverse reforms in the global system of redistribution without being substantially compensated for their efforts, except, and only in part, in the countries at the center of the world-economy.

 

Nevertheless, if we observe their historical development over the longue durée, the global family of anti-systemic movements is growing in strength in spite of this.  And in fact, in recent decades, the internal struggles among the upper classes have, in some measure, weakened their hegemony.  But it hasn’t been sufficient, and one of the principle ways by which the operations of other institutions of the world-system have decelerated and distorted the democratizing influence of anti-systemic movements derives from the fact that as each of the successful movements became increasingly bureaucratic and came to rely on diverse skill-sets unequally distributed among the populace, they began to rely on the inclusion (in their bulk cadres) of people from the third sector of the upper stratus: the aspirant cadres (Wallerstein, 1998c: 32).  And a second, central factor in the distortion and deceleration of the democratizing influence of anti-systemic movements has been the, in the short-term, “necessary” alliances between social classes, alliances which in the long-term, given the matrix of capitalist contradictions, and the hierarchical mode in which they were formed, turned out to be counterproductive and demobilizing.

 

As should be obvious, for the super-accumulators the most dangerous power of the anti-systemic movements are the disintegrating consequences of mass mobilizations – their economic repercussions in the present and the threat they present to the system in a possible future.   If mass mobilizations can, for a while, be ignored and repressed – a common double-tactic, there comes a time in which they no longer can be, because they can trigger profound and prolonged political explosions, which in many cases cannot be controlled even by the same movements that unleashed them.  For the super-accumulators and for the aspirant cadres that are positioned to play effective and important leadership roles, it turns out to be advantageous to come to agreements and work together to detain or restrain the mobilization (Wallerstein, 1998e: 34).  And historically, when movements have been incorporated into the State machinery and taken on functional roles within it, the quantity of aspirant cadres and the influence they peddle peaks, and they tend to slow down and moderate the movement of the anti-systemic movement, which is where its strength lies, its popular power.

Given that this dynamic (of cooptation and incorporation) has repeated many times over, this ambivalent participation of the aspirant cadres has become increasingly recognized, diminishing the naiveté of the rank-and-file and leading to the exploration of new strategies, and in particular, autonomist ones.

 

For thirty years now two contradictory tendencies have been developing in the global family of social movements.  On one side, the expansion of the institutional roles played by the aspirant cadres, a development which tended to reinforce the homeostatic operations of the world system (albeit limited by economic pressures which have frustrated their upward mobility).  On the other, the expansion of the social bases of the social movements and an improvement in the quality of the formation of their militants, a situation which has lead to the development of new, alternative strategies.  Rather than concentrating merely on the taking of State power, anti-systemic movements are increasingly focusing their energies on strategies related to popular self-management and popular assemblies.  This has paid off.  Anti-systemic movements have seen their political power increase and are laying the foundations for a human inhabiting of a different sort.

This second, autonomist tendency, seems to be overtaking the institutionalizing tendency of anti-systemic movements over the last two decades thanks to a new strategic orientation that many are taking.

 

Undoubtedly, Social Intervention today, as an academic, governmental and non-governmental institutional praxis, even when complex and critical, is instrumentalized by experts who hail from the middle classes.  But their ranks are full-to-brimming with aspirant cadres, whose supposed honesty neither confirms nor denies the fact that their political orientation, insofar as it is influenced by their class position, has tended to reinforce the dynamic of the current world-system.

 

Taking a critical look at social intervention, we might use as a criterion to measure in general terms the consequences of the last 60 years of social intervention indicators of the actual socio-economic situation of the large majorities of the world population (Le Cacheux, 2011).  And it becomes evident that the greater part of the resources and efforts social interventionists have deployed have resulted, by and large, not in a substantial transformation of the living conditions of precarious populations, but rather in the conservation of the structural conditions that support the quality of life of the social interventionists themselves.  Although this may seem mediocre in comparison to the quality of life of clearly more privileged sectors, they are the product of class privilege.  This is a key factor contributing to the containment and invisibilization of the worldwide class struggle.

 

 

At the same time, those communities and movement leaders who practice forms of popular self-management that are relatively uncritical and lack political vocation and global orientation, have tended to be easily co-opted or else marginalized by media blackouts and surgical State-repression. 

 

All of these dilemmas have become increasingly evident with the massive arrival on the scene of “global” social politics, as vigorous as they are controversial.  The recognition of the global foundation of social inequities and geopolitical turbulence has lead to an increase in the number of supranational institutions, such as non-governmental organizations linked through international networks, that directly take on the responsibility for developing and executing social interventionist policy and the production of knowledge related to these practices.  But the presence and strength of anti-systemic movements that are solidly rooted in communitarian and territorial popular self-management has also increased, and movements of this type are increasingly opening themselves to international coordination and global struggle.

 

In this way, the struggle between governing classes and globally-oriented local and national social movements is transforming the objectives of social policy, as relate to both social interventionist and popular self-managerial practices.  As a result, the design of both, social interventionist and popular self-managerial policy will be increasingly focused on inequities and global social processes, in relation to the transition to a new world-system that is taking place and which constitutes a substantial rupture with respect to the past, and at the same time, liberates us to take advantage of important opportunities that the future presents (Lee, Martin, Sonntag, Taylor, Wallerstein & Wieviorka, 2005).

IV) The Historic Political Project for Dignified Life and the Three-pronged Strategy of the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle (MPL).

In Chile, the MPL works not only for the right to housing and the social production of hábitat, but also for the daily construction of a social horizon that we call Vida Digna (Dignified Life).  The three axes of this work are: political struggle, popular communitarian self-managment, and popular education.  These are pursued according to an innovative and complex three-pronged strategy, advancing: without the State, from the State, and against the State (MPL, 2011), a political line that incorporates tactics ranging from insurgency to legal reform, from popular self-management to the petitioning of rights, from the construction of territorial autonomy to the winning of seats on elected governing bodies, from the creation of local popular power to the organization of a popular national constitutional assembly, and active participation in the creation of Latin American and global networks.

 

Without the State, insofar as they are a movement focused on territorial popular self-management and nonprofit productive cooperatives.  Against the State, through permanent mobilization (both in the street and in the halls of power) that aims to resist State repression that criminalizes, represses and co-opts social struggles.  And from the State, not only through the fight for popular administration of the various subsidies and resources controlled by the State (housing, education, etc.), but also through the formation, together with other anti-systemic movements, of a political party: Igualdad.  The party was explicitly created to function as a rearguard political tool to be used by movements, in the sense that it aims to put its direction in the hands of the social movements, basing its policy and strategic alignment on the agreements arrived at in the popular assemblies (made up of rank-and-file members and organizers), and not in the hands of the political cadres of a traditional party structure.

 

Co-inspiration and collaboration are possible and emerge from a genuinely democratic assembly life.  Any social movement, when its participants agree to coordinate their efforts by establishing transitory bodies of principles that are continuously open to revision, in the process of deliberatively co-inspiring relational networks that design and implement common projects, can give rise to such a life,  if and only if, its common projects are genuinely common (Dávila & Maturana, 2007).  If people are present in spaces of quotidian communal living and are taken seriously by their peers and collaborators, this lends a special sense of meaning to their lives and contributes to making possible, more fluid and synergetic the coincidence of desires and preferences that undergird collective actions and allow us to establish and persevere in common projects.

 

The common project of the MPL involves a dual orientation and a dual temporality, toward to the present and toward a future horizon: the struggle for a social production of human habitat and the frontal struggle against capitalism by cultivating Dignified Life.

And what does the MPL understand by Dignified Life?  Let’s see what one of the militants of the movement has to say about it in his own words:

“If Dignified Life is a horizon, it does not correspond to a distant future that we will conquer after passing through many stages of development. It is, rather, far from a life that we propose to achieve later on, the new man and the new woman who looks for answers in the past and finds themself living history in the present.  There is no future to which to arrive, only a present to construct with the community on your territory.  We are talking about a popular power that develops alongside a social construction of human habitat and creates options for the grassroots organization of new forms of life.  It is an organizational model that struggles to give a new ethics to the territories and new ways to relate to each other in community” (MPL, 2011: 32).

 

And more specifically, with respect to the New Community, the New Communalists and Dignified Life, as concepts that have been developed by movement leaders in a consensual, self-critical reflection related to their own praxis, it has been said that:

“The new kind of community is that community in which the principles of solidarity, of popular self-management, and of love are privileged over the principles of envy, enclosure and individualism currently in force in our society.  This new community is a community that has cooperative start-ups, that enjoys quality public spaces, and that first constitutes itself on the basis of dignified housing for all (…).  Dignified life for us, as I mentioned, is not a utopia.  It is not a utopia.  It is a project that is lived in the present tense.  We do not believe that dignified life will be conquered in the passage through progressive stages, in a teleological sense, right?  Rather, it is a project that we have to go on building day by day, because it has nothing to do with having more money in our pockets but in how we manage to relate to each other in different ways.  And to relate to each other in new ways we don’t have to wait 20 years, we can do it now”.

^[9]

 

As the current conjuncture has imposed particular means, here the ends do not justify these, they define them.  And these means have to do with the three-pronged strategy we pointed out earlier.  And just as we can see in the following citation, this politics has been in development since the first Congress of the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle.

 

First, with respect to From [the State]: “We are able to move strategically along an institutional path (the educational non-profit ‘Corporación Poblar,’ the social housing developer ‘EGIS MPL,’ the formation of a legal personality for our assemblies, the application to a variety of government subsidies, the construction company ‘MPL Constructora Ltda.,’ etc.)” (MPL y CESCC, 2008: 3).

 

And with respect to Against [the State]: “We know that without mobilizing ourselves we become stagnant and we don’t advance our goals.  That is why we know when to dialogue and when to fight.” (MPL y CESCC, 2008: 4).

 

And finally, with respect to Without [the State]:

“As members of poor communities we should value each other.  Reinforce ourselves in our unions and in our own cooperative productive projects. As members of poor communities we have to, in addition, take the risk to create our own popular businesses, cooperatives, and social businesses.  In this way we will be creating our own means of livelihood, we will control the production, and we will assure ourselves of dignified labor conditions” (MPL y CESCC, 2008: 5).

 

This three-pronged strategy undergirds the constitution of all of the small productive and political units of the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle, such as, among others: the Paulo Freire School for Adults and Youth, the Social Housing Developer and MPL Construction Company, the Popular City Councillorship, and the political party Igualdad.  Now then, evidently we cannot artificially separate the strategic dimensions without, against, from since in each of our movement spaces the three operate in tandem, though certain projects have a stronger tendency in one or another direction.

 

In the Paulo Freire School, they work from the State, satisfying the norms that it demands and accepting in return a governmental subsidy that allows the school to function.  They also work without the State, autonomously developing their own educational policy in the shadows and cracks that the official policy leaves open, to their creating a new kind of education based on the dedication of the staff who worked an entire year without receiving a salary, and in the self-financing activities (parties, fundraisers, etc.) we carry out to supplement the entirely inadequate government subsidy.  And they work against the State, offering a critical and reflexive education that questions the basis of the State and the capitalist system in general and opening up spaces for the professional development and political struggle of our students, such as the Assembly of Students, which is an uncommon practice in the educational establishments of the country, and the constant offering of opportunities for the students to involve themselves in popular struggles. 

We could say the same of the Popular Councillorship

[10]

, which although is financed by a State subsidy, and from within the belly of the Beast, is always oriented toward and counts on the force generated by the mobilization of the grassroots of the movement and other communal organizations in order to fight for popular needs and demands, in a dynamic that is simultaneously without and against the State.

 

The same occurs in every entity of the MPL, and it is this complex relational network, fraught with tensions and not without its contradictions, that distinguishes the MPL as utopistic, which is to say, a movement which engages in permanent evaluation and construction of the viable historic alternatives for the realization of non-capitalist forms of human existence, that is, forms of life not centered on the incessant accumulation of capital, and anti-patriarchal modes of social relating, that is, relations not centered on domination, appropriation and control.

 

All of this praxis has been crystallizing into a political line that surpassed the borders of the MPL and has come to form the foundational politics of the National Federation of Urban Communalists, of the political party Igualdad, and of the People’s Path toward a Popular Constitutional Assembly.  It has to do with the creation of a Social Area (from), a Social Roundtable (without), and a Popular Constitutional Assembly (against).  In the MPL and the coalitions and popular alliances it has forged, all of the popular forces convened are fighting to expand, in the facts, the Social Area that the market and the State constantly claim.  We see this in the series of popular conquests that have been made related to housing, the right to the city, education, health, work, etc., as well as in the development of local control of public resources and institutions through the governance of territorial neighborhood assemblies.

 

The Social Roundtable was activated during the occupation of public land, on the banks of the Mapocho River in downtown Santiago, by the National Federation of Urban Communities (FENAPO)

^[11]

.  A diverse array of collective actors participated: student movements, unions, a variety of cultural and political organizations, together with, of course, the federated organizations of urban communalists.  The Social Roundtable calls not for solidarity but for unity in struggle and the creation of a popular consensus, through dialogue and commitment, which is defended on the Roundtable and in the street, without the State.

 

Finally, the Popular Constitutional Assembly represents a call to establish a popular way forward toward a constituent assembly, from below, from all of the popular assemblies so that, as the MPL says, “The people lead.”  This is part of the strategic dimension that works against the State, which does not aim to create a law, but rather to unite the popular struggles in order to change the correlation of class forces at the national level, from below.

 

The way that the Movement of Urban Communities in Struggle conceives of Popular Self-Management is different from the way the majority of social movements in Chile today do, even though it is similar to conceptions other parts of Latin America.  For this popular movement, popular self-management is not simply a matter of autonomist financing (without the State or the market), it’s not about coordinating the few or many resources that one has at hand, rather, it also includes the contestation of State power and capturing from the State the resources that everyone in the national territory collectively produces so that these can be put to use by their movements.

 

At the same time, the MPL attempts to dispute State power by taking seats in elected government bodies, especially city governments, and in this way direct government-managed resources to anti-systemic movements.  In concert with other anti-systemic movements around the world, they have been able to begin to distance themselves from the viscous and tentacular capitalist mode of production upon placing central importance on the creation of productive unities and lifestyles oriented toward the de-commercialization of the diverse relations of production: material-energetic, industrial-commercial, educational-investigative, etc.  And toward this end, popular community self-management, cooperative and assembly-based, is the dynamic that is most clearly present as a vital source for the construction of historical alternatives, driven forward by the protagonism of utopistics anti-systemic movements.  In the words of a member of the MPL, Claudia Pacheco: “Popular self-management is the mother to all the struggles” (personal communication, 2012).

 

Finally, I would like to point out that this way of conceiving of popular self-management is similar to certain social interventionist practices, insofar as they work in part from within existing institutional structures and insofar as they work within territories that are populated not only by members of the MPL, including situations in which a local chapter of the Movement where it has not yet established a housing assembly.  Nevertheless, the distinction lies in that each separate working group or project is part of the same project, the project of the popular classes.  As movement militant Guillermo Gonzalez points out, “it is not social intervention because we, the poor, are deciding our own destiny, here others are not in charge, the class is, and only in the people we trust” (personal communication, 2013).

 

In fact, this orientation is already implied in the definitions made during the first Congress of the movement which, referring to the history of class struggle in Chile in general, signal: “We should trust in that popular instinct that for years has allowed us to move forward” (MPL y CESCC, 2008: 5), an instinct that authorizes us to self-govern and self-educate, breaking with the demobilizing standards of the aspirant cadres that have done so much to preserve the capitalist world-system.

 

V) Utopistics Conclusions: From the World-System, Without and Against it.

It is evident that social interventionists, popular self-managers, anti-systemic activists and militants alike are living and work within the capitalist world-system, we are woven into the relational matrix which constitutes it.  From the State registry of our identity to the credit cards we carry, and including the incredibly large web of diverse relations to which we are intertwined.

 

However, by emulating and reformulating and broadening the strategy of MPL (from, without, and against the State), it is also possible to work, through diverse dimensions, without the world-system and against it, if we remain decidedly committed to the processes that generate consensual autonomy and popular communalist power.  And it is here where a relationship between social intervention and popular self-management could prove temporarily fruitful, aiming to fortify the possibility of a transition to another world-system that is oriented toward egalitarian democracy. 

 

Such a relationship cannot be forged, however, any way we choose.  If we aren’t careful an alliance between practitioners of these two schools of thought and action could produce opposite results. If the relational dynamics of social intervention and popular self-management do not nourish through action, on the one hand, the conditions of possibility for generating and preserving territorial, assembly-based political organization (the main fount of popular communalist power), and continuous interaction between the global family of anti-systemic movements on the other, they will fall short of their transformative aims.  They will operate not merely (and necessarily) from within the capitalist world-system in the short-term, but also preserving its foundational dynamics in the long-term.  In so doing, they will be sustaining, consciously or not, the conditions for the formation of a new world-system just as or more anti-democratic, unequal and polarizing as the current one.  And, in addition, we would continue along within the framework of the psychic era of patriarchy.

If they follow the path of the co-creation of new, politically autonomous, democratic, de-commercialized and de-commercializing relational matrices (like MPL’s cooperative enterprises), and articulate themselves in global networks of like-minded organizations and actors, they will participate in a dynamic which in the long-term will dissolve the foundations of senile capitalism (Amin, 2001) and create the conditions of possibility for a more egalitarian and democratic world.

 

This implies not only tons of local and global coordination, but also an increasingly wise and astute management of the tensions between the old, new and newest Left.  Between those that wish to create something like a new International that in organizational terms would be vertical and in terms of its long-term objectives would be homogenizing, and those who insist in the rights of groups and individuals as permanent fixtures of a future world-system and who advocate for horizontal and decentralized organizing strategies, and those, like MPL, who believe that it is possible and desirable to take elements from both strategies and to combine them strategically as we move toward a transition from the current world-system (Wallerstein, 2006b).

 

But for this to happen, we believe that those responsible for the interventionist dynamic will have to put themselves at the disposition of popularly self-managing communities in a radically political way, one that definitely implies giving up a leadership role.  What’s more, we think that in not a few occasions it will imply, as has happened in the case of MPL militants, going beyond the threshold of the logic of mere participation toward a log of commitment, and moving from professional forms of commitment to vital, solidarious commitment, which is to say, finding ways to become a part of the communities with which one aims to intervene with an orientation that focuses on popular self-management (even in cases where resources come from the State).  Or in some cases, collaborating with social movements who popularly self-manage social and communalist interventions in new territories.

 

All of this while remaining focused on the strengthening of anti-systemic movements, taking into consideration what we have already seen regarding the historically ambiguous relationship amongst leading cadres and also the unavoidable fact that the definition of social “problems” by experts will always be incomplete, especially when they separate these from the complex matrix of relational processes which actively produce them.

 

In this way, the idea that one can simply intervene to resolve long-standing social ills has to be substituted by the recognition that the mere action of specialists or of those in positions of power needs to be supplanted by a praxis of continuous co-inspiration and collaboration with communities, a qualitatively different relationship than those generated by negotiations and instrumental alliances.  This would allow us to insistently and persistently maintain a reflexive orientation, and to constantly redefine analytic criteria, including the concepts and tools develop the capacity to project materially possible and ethically desirable futures.

 

It is important to have in mind the great difference between a social psychology of liberation that is genuinely anti-systemic, and a psychology (social or communitarian) based on institutional social interventionism.  The latter is guided by a developmentalist paradigm, aiming at the overcoming of poverty, while the former, on the other hand, a liberating popular social psychology (Muñoz, 2015) that the people themselves perform as part of their resistance to capitalism, is guided by the direct democracy of Good Living and Dignified Life on which the popular self-management of a new human existence is based.  The political project of this popular form of social psychology does not aim to overcome poverty, but wealth: its incessant accumulation on worldwide scales.

 

A Popular Social Psychology of Liberation, if it exists or once did, is part of the relational matrix of anti-systemic forces fighting for global liberation and that from below, where the rivers of history of longue durée circulate, continuously weave relations in which the seeds of another tomorrow are dispersed and planted in the tomorrow-present of well-being and autonomy for all.

 

It is fundamental to learn and relearn, as a collective of peoples and oppressed classes, to not place our attention primarily on what we want to change – we usually generate opposition, tectonic disturbances, and above all blindness in relation to our actual goals when we do so.  Rather, we have to be able to define ourselves, in the first place, by what we want to conserve, and in so doing open up spaces generative of co-inspiration with organizations that are squarely in the hands of the popular classes, and not the strata that control the wealth and political power in the world today, who tell as that everything needs to change,  but,  so that everything stays the same.

 

Just as the Systemic Law of Conservation, Change and Transformation referred to above indicates: with and in every system, every change occurs in relation to something that is conserved.  If what we want to conserve are consensual autonomy and the well-being of all, then what remains open to change will be domination, appropriation, profit, control, privilege, discrimination, inequity and competition, all of which are consubstantial to the functioning of the current world-system.

 

Reformulating the celebrated judgment of Rosa Luxemburg regarding our current state of affairs, perhaps today we should declare “Utopistic Popular Self-Management or Neocolonial Barbarism.”

 

 

 

 

 

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