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Another afternoon, at the Zócalo Book Fair, I heard Armando Bartra a phrase that originates this text: We have a resistance left but not a construction left
. The idea has to do with the fact that social movements, to be true
They must comply with a prescription of what they should be: against the State and power because they are only coercion; in favor of a communal fiction that precedes any idea of the political. The criticism that Michel Focault made of the left remains valid that, instead of practicing a different type of politics, it measured itself with its relationship in accordance with a text and its interpretations. For a century and a half, the idea of the revolutionary
it was external to politics itself and served to measure even the arts. There was never a glimpse of what would happen after the event of rupture, that is, how a new art of government was instituted because that is done in the exercise of power and politics, and the true
left just resist. When the rupture came, the left and the right agreed that they could not see it, let alone understand it.
As in 1988, 2018 was a social movement that did not follow the prescription of what true
: It was through the ballot box, it was constituted through a political leadership that for decades made public the conflicts of the excluded with the privileged, and built a discourse of the village
to register in the homeland, democracy and the State. This movement, the obradorismo, is a set of demands articulated in the common trunk of inequality and the fight against corruption. Throughout the Republic, various organizations were equating their differences in that discourse and named themselves with the second surname of the leader they created. The right would use, since then, the first surname, López, to despise him as a person, without realizing that this contempt was precisely the identity of his collective creators. I don’t belong to myself
It clearly states the leader’s awareness of being the result of a movement against privilege and for inclusion. To take him to the presidency, the movement had opted for suffrage and the hope that, from there, it could subvert the country where the only sovereignty was of the elites.
Half a six-year term has passed and lopezobradorism has created institutions. Social programs organized as constitutional rights have established a link between many organizations and the state. What the right despises as patronize
and an authoritarianism without checks, the left true
he sees it as a capture of the emancipatory forces in the logic of the state and capitalism. What does happen is the irruption of millions into politics. This change in mentality –the deep attitudes and response behaviors– points out the conflict in a public way in its relationship with the common core of the demands: the privilege obtained by corruption. For example, tax waivers, legislative kickbacks or the respectability of shell company owners are not thinkable. Is it little for the hopes placed on the obradorismo? I say the obvious: between an instituting process and an instituted one there will always be a loss. This is due to the excess that exists in every political denomination: the people, democracy, equality. All these words contain an abundance of meaning that, when forming institutions, reveal the insufficiency of time, the nature of human beings and fortune with its stream of contingencies. Moreover, each of those words contains within it the absence that we are by the mere fact of wishing. But it also realizes the possibility that we have to build around a void.
What has happened in these years is crucial: from a lack, a discourse has been constructed that articulates inequality as politically thinkable, and a village
, that is to say, a plebeian republic in the bosom of the most corrupt, disdainful and uncritical neoliberalism. It is not an ideal community whose management could fall to people who know what is good. It is the public expression of our conflicts and antagonisms. It is not little in a country that lived under the yoke of peace and stability
, the mexican miracle
and the neoliberal depoliticization that led the economic elite to create public law. It is about going from that obedient subject of the PRI and of the businessman himself, abandoned to his own forces of neoliberalism, to a political being that demands collective decisions. Therefore, it scares, not the return of the words village
, sovereignty
, State
, but its use by the populace; the construction of the social from the political, the change of place in a relationship of dominance. Every decision is awarded to the leader, but isn’t it that now the usual decisions, made by experts in the dark, are made explicit? Are there no irruptions of the social movement within the institutions? Or will we continue with the belief that there is something outside political decisions such as the liberal neutrality of institutions, the technocratic efficacy of the market or the harmony of the singularities of community autonomism?
What has happened cannot be reduced to an event or a political strategy. What we are experiencing is the irruption of the excluded into the field of politics and that does not stop easily. To continue thinking that there is a purity in social movements that are not inscribed in the rights that express this irruption, is to continue thinking that the opposite of the State is society. And it is not. At least in the Mexican case, it is the Church, in any of its metamorphoses.
