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Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 3:34 PM
Subject: [Cuba SI] TRIcontinental: Those who abandon Hope
from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: TRIcontinental: Those who abandon hope
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000
Tricontinental . NUMBER 143, 1999 - Neruda, Che
"Those who abandon hope"
By Armando de Magdalena, a member of the leadership of the Communist
Party of Argentina and is on the advisory and editorial boards of the
Argentine magazine 'Posdatas de manana' and the Italian magazine 'II
Maiakovsky'. He is a member of the Cultural Association of Santiago
de Cuba, an institution that included this talk in a workshop on
"Culture, Third World, Third Millennium".
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On the threshold of the 2000th year of the Christian era, the first
mistake from the point of view of our culture would be to say that
America is on the threshold of the third millennium. While it pains
many to say so, this continent has experienced more than 30,000 years
of uninterrupted history, of processes founding and constituting its
identity as a people, a nation. The continent passed through extended
periods of vital accumulation and autonomous development, which
allowed civilizations to unfold on its soil that had no need to envy
those of the so-called "known world". These civilizations achieved
such high social development that they served to inspire the utopian
socialists of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The evidence of that distant splendor remains today for all who
want to see it in Tiawanaku, Machu Picchu, Palenque, Chichen Itza,
Teotihuacan, etc. But above all and equally eloquent are the peasant
masses of Our America who still preserve - as Argentine philosopher
Rodolfo Kusch documented extensively - an absolutely original way of
thinking, popular Latin American thought. This continent is also
where, perhaps as nowhere else, the most diverse cultures on the
planet have come together and been synthesized, a process that
continues to this day and that speaks clearly to the vitality and
universal vision of our culture.
Because of this, it is our obligation as Latin American
intellectuals to reject completely the ethnocentric and re-
colonialist position underscored in phrases like the "discovery of
the Americas", the 500th anniversary of which - I mention in passing
- was celebrated with a great clamor by the majority of leaders and
intellectuals of the continent and which put us in the unique
position of being the only people in history to celebrate their own
conquest. We should also reject this novel idea (not really so
novel) that we should enter the culture of the third millennium, when
in fact our collective life experience goes far beyond a mere three
thousand years.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing about Carbon 14 dating,
about whether this or that piece of pottery is more or less than 500
years old. What I am posing, is that the countries of the so-called
First World, with their ethnocentric view of the planet, have used
all the means at their disposal to pick apart our cultures as a
prerequisite to their leadership and our subjugation.
Archeological science was born as the science of domination, in the
heat of colonialism, as one of the needs of colonialism: to know in
order to conquer. What responsibility did our intellectuals and
artists share in this process of systematic accumulation of data that
we have suffered for more than 500 years? This is the question that
we should all be trying to answer.
The history books with which we have been educated begin with
the discovery of America and, in the best of cases, dedicate an
opening chapter to a summary of 30,000 years of our history. There
is a suspicious reticence to acknowledge the antiquity and importance
of the archeological finds in the Americas and in the Third World in
general. This underestimation of our peoples has been taken to the
absurd extreme of giving credit for the Egyptian pyramids or the
temple-city of Machu Picchu to visitors from other galaxies!
There are those who today assure us that Homo sapiens appeared on
earth before, and not after, the separation of the continents. This
would mean - without invalidating the migration theories of Hrdlicka
and others - that human beings appeared simultaneously all over the
world. This theory is gaining strength as a result of intensifying
field studies in the Third World. Today the African origins of
humanity are discussed on the basis of finds like the Lucy skeleton
on the so-called "Dark Continent". As a corollary to this, the
discovery of true 'Jurassic Parks" - in the best Spielberg style - in
Patagonia and the Argentine foothills and the anthropometric studies
of the Uro people on the Bolivian altiplano irrefutably show, at the
very least, the antiquity and importance of our culture.
The idea, rooted in the collective unconscious, that our history
began on October 12, 1492, has conditioned a large portion of the
intellectuals of this continent to be first seduced and then coopted
by the culture of the.. rulers of the world" and has served, both
consciously and unconsciously, as a fifth column in their efforts at
recolonization. This by itself explains why today we think in terms
of the third millennium for Our America.
Without a doubt, October 12, 1492, is a key date in our history.
But it would be good for all Americans to ask ourselves - in light of
the grave suffering of our peoples - where this 500-year crusade to
civilize us has led. October 12 undoubtedly was a glorious day, but
not for us - for a section of European feudal society that by force
constituted itself as a class and called itself the bourgeoisie. Its
arrival on these shores - just as the authors of The Communist
Manifesto pointed out 150 years ago - not only made the crowns fall
along with the heads that held them, but also and above all, it
allowed the development of that embryonic capitalism, carrying it to
the galactic levels that we know today.
So I believe that we would have to characterize that October 12 as
a "meeting of cultures". That it was, but one marked then as it is
today with the stamp of subjugation, of extermination, and of looting
because - as Che said so well - that is its nature.
The arrival of the third millennium of the Christian epoch should
have served; in any case, to have made a palpable reality of the
profound humanism contained in the Sermon on the Mount. But those
beatitudes today seem very distant and, distinct from those of the
past; the prophets of the third millennium predict despair, not
liberation.
It was only yesterday that Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history,
the immortality of the present, tossing the red monster out the
window once and for all. All the inhabitants of the planet prepared
ourselves for the year of jubilee. But it turns out that none of that
came about and very much to the contrary, as the "perfect fools" had
said, history hasn't ended, especially not in this little corner of
the universe. This can be seen - to cite just one case - in the
struggle of the Colombian patriots led by Marulanda Velez (Tiro Fijo)
who are knocking on the gates of Bogota.
Capitalism has shown us only too well its capacity to regenerate and
come up with new answers in order to perpetuate itself over time.
Cloaked today in neoliberalism, it seeks to pass off the old as new
using its devaluated magic. To accomplish this goal, this haughty
capitalism is served by a veritable army of intellectuals who dazzle
us with their deceit and distortions, who pose false questions for
debate, and who wield all kinds of fallacies in order to win a place
in the superstructure of that hegemonic power that today successfully
aims to govern our lives and our souls.
Those intellectuals who've "abandoned hope" are the most effective
weapon that capitalism has ever had to tear down the ramparts of
human dignity. And we must understand that today, in this stage of
capitalism, domination is not only political and economic, but also
cultural. We need to understand that in the logic of neoliberalism,
culture of the third millennium means "amnesia imposed at the point
of a gun", "the endpoint of our historic past" and, therefore,
abandoning all hope". Globalization, in these terms, doesn't mean
synthesis; instead it means replacing our national goals with
a culture in service to a third of the earth's population who are the
real citizens of this worldwide empire.
We, the Spartacuses of the turn of the century, those who have
witnessed with our own eyes the triumph of a "world
counterrevolution", those who ourselves have suffered and continue to
suffer the "neoliberal orgy of the guests at the wedding" - we are
the ones who have the duty and the right to wage the most formidable
battle of this age-old war, the toughest, the most Quixotic battle -
and under the worst conditions, This is the countercultural battle: a
countercultural battle against the system as an institution, against
the huge information networks that not only tell the world what to
say and when to say it, but even what we should think about. It is a
battle against those who shape the opinions of each and
every inhabitant of the planet, who fragment reality and history,
placing an equal sign between the conditions of war in Bosnia-
Herzegovina and Bill Clinton's oral sex escapades. It is a battle
against consumerism, against possibilism and social indifference,
against the drugs that devour youth in every corner of the earth,
against the technology of the dollar and its high priests. It is a
battle that is a waged mercilessly against our people's identity
and that we can only win when we can instill in them the necessity
and viability of achieving our destiny, to which so many have
contributed, and which comes to all of us from the same origins.
This is the "glorious challenge of being one people until the end."
We, the children of the white conquistador, of the ridiculed slave,
of the wretched Indian - Americans all of us by luck or by right -
must cease to live with r nationality in pieces.
Those who abandon hope who, as singer-poet Silvio Rodriguez said so
well in his song "El Necio" (The Idiot), "offer us so much shit,"
want to make us believe that we were born yesterday and are therefore
incapable of determining our own destiny, of rethinking utopia in
order to follow our own paths toward the future. Those "illustrious
men in Armani suits" the Vargas Liosas, the Montaners, want to make
us cheerfully believe that we were "perfect idiots" - and still are
They want us to accept that label and not worry about it. But we're
in good company, because if we are idiots, so, too were Hatuey,
Lautaro, Tupac Amaru, San Martin Artigas, Bolivar, Sandino, and Che.
We feel like we're in good company with the 30,000 disappeared and
the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with the strikers, the homeless
huddled around their fires, the Bolivian miners, the landless
peasants of Brazil, the insurgent Indians in southeastern Mexico, and
the Cuban revolution. And this is what really worries these
courtesans and their imperial bosses, that we might link yesterday
with today, that we might imagine America as one nation, as one
people with a single and unique destiny.
It is not for naught that writers like Regis Debray dedicate
themselves to demeaning Che, draining him of content in order to
deprive future generations of his ideas and his example, just as in
the past they treated the liberators and all those who fought to the
end. It is not for naught that those like Castaneda at the risk of
appearing ridiculous would like us to take their abandonment of the
struggle as irrefutable truth. But for all that they write, utopia is
not disarmed - not even close.
Only a few days after this literary abortion had appeared, what
was undoubtedly the most important cultural fact of the last decade
on our continent emerged: the Zapatista insurrection. Beyond
whatever evaluations may be made of this movement, the fact is that
when all of us in America were getting ready to become part of the
First World, from the same historical roots the timeless face of the
earth burst forth to tell us that nothing had changed that the choice
today remains the same. With knit caps and carbines, Mayan Indians,
as if in a dream, broadcast on the Internet and the big television
networks to tell us that the era of the Americans is not the era of
the conquistador, that there is no end of the century or
third millenium, but a timeless present, "homeland or death",
"American or in ashes".
They tried to tell us this, and not with out great effort, these men
who in 500 years couldn't learn the language of their assassins.
Sometimes I think hopefully how good and how desirable it would be if
on one October 12, certain American intellectuals were to discover
the continent of their birth, discover this other America - which in
reality is one and the same America because its struggle is one and
the same. Not a day on earth has gone by that this America hasn't
been fighting for liberty. This fight can be won, as we have done so
many times, because there is no enemy that can't be defeated, and no
battle that shouldn't be waged. There is no valid excuse: the
colonialists of the 19th century weren't less powerful or ferocious
than today's neoliberalism and its neighbors, So let's fight for
a second independence. Let them stay behind, the "repentant fools"
in their "airborne republics" enjoying the virtual reality of
vassals, while we go on creating America.
It remains clear (at least to us) that there are only two choices:
either we assimilate ourselves into the hegemonic wave of post-
modernity or we wage a countercultural battle that makes viable the
continuity of our plan.
In the capitalist world, the "official culture" has opted for the
former, while it is the popular artists and the ever more scarce
progressive intellectuals who have adopted countercultural positions
of resistance and preservation of their historic legacy. The
alternative culture generated by independent and autonomous groups is
an unconcealable phenomenon in these times, and it is a valid and
efficient method of struggle against the official culture in the
capitalist countries.
We shouldn't fail to mention that the majority of the countries of
what was formerly called the socialist camp, despite the undeniable
relative advances that they achieved for the people in education and
culture, did not escape this phenomenon. The causes of their collapse
were not solely the erroneous interpretation and practice of Marxism.
Imperialism also brought a defeat in terms of culture, carried out
through ideological contraband and the seduction and cooptation of
the intellectuals for imperialist goals. Nobody can fail to
recognize that most - if not all - of those who were behind
this debacle, and who today apply the neoliberal policies of those
countries with fire and brimstone, were educated and molded by the
institutions of real socialism and were part of the structure and
superstructure of those states. We need to think about the importance
of this phenomenon.
We need to be able to drive ahead in this colossal endeavor and, to
do so; the first thing we need is to overcome our own deficiencies,
our own limitations. Individualism, social apathy, and exhibitionism
can't continue to be the fundamental character of our intellectualism
because they only lead us to ostracism, diversions, egocentrism, and
pure competition.
The process of learning to be human can only end when life itself is
over, but it is certain that how knowledge is processed and applied
is as important as acquiring the knowledge itself. We all know very
well that knowledge is a power that can be exercised over those who
do not have it and, as Anibal Ponce demonstrated brilliantly in
"Education and the class struggle", its effects can be positive or
negative, liberating or alienating, depending on who wields this
power and to what purpose.
So we can't go on judging our intellectuals based on how many books
per hour they read or by the gallons of ink that they pour onto the
page. Now is the time to once again judge our intellectuals and
artists not just for their brilliance, but also for the contribution
that they make toward the consolidation of our identity as a people-
nation and for the services they provide to the cause of America.
Those that manage to overcome their limitations will be intellectuals
and artists of a new type, organic intellectuals (in the Gramsci
sense) of our liberation. They will be those charged with advancing
the not contemptible task of synthesizing this "union of diversity"
that is our culture, a culture that serves to strengthen our identity
and our ties as a people, a culture that, by recapturing its history
and its people, tries to recreate and synthesize the different
sources from which we are sprung: the culture of the original
peoples, the culture of the white conquistador, the culture of the
Black slave, and the culture that has resulted from the fusion
- forced or not - of the three, together with those that have
continued to flow together with them up until our times.
To achieve this we will have to wage a difficult internal battle
against one of the principal brakes on the development of a true
popular American culture: elitism. This is a phenomenon that
respects neither capitalism nor socialism, but that has more to do
with a conception that the agents of culture have of themselves and
their relation to the rest of society.
In "I refuse to masticate theories", Pablo Neruda pointed to this
phenomenon in poetry with these words: "A number of overly learned
people take it upon themselves to obscure the light, to turn bread
into coal, the word into a vise. In order to isolate the poor poet
from his poor brothers, from his companions on this earth, they tell
him all manners of enchanting lies. 'You are a magician,' they
repeat. 'You are the god of obscurity.' Sometimes we poets believe
these things and repeat them as if we'd been granted a kingdom. The
truth is these flatterers want to rob us of a kingdom that threatens
them: the realm of communication in song among all human beings."
This communication in song between human beings that Pablo refers to
is the only path because culture is a dynamic, interactive, and -
above all - antidogmatic process. To return the people's history to
them and to allow them to express themselves with beauty is to lift
them out of the barbarity that more than 500 years of "civilization"
has brought them. We have to stop creating culture for the people
and begin to create it from the people.
We must be prepared to wage this battle on three different planes:
first, against ourselves (in terms of our separation from others);
second, against the fragmentation of our nationality and for a new
cosmic vision; and third, counterculturally inside and outside our
societies. Inside our societies the battle is to stop and try to
reverse the process of acculturation, recolonization, and
subjugation, outside, the battle is against "those who abandon hope"
and the Eurocentric and elitist intellectuals who serve as
a "beachhead" and an "ideological base", respectively, for the neo-
imperial offensive on our continent.
We have a tradition of struggle that fills us with pride. It would be
good if we could rise to its level and ask ourselves why an educated
landowning member of the bourgeoisie [Simon Bolivar], educated in the
best traditions of the Renaissance, rode on horseback - a traitor to
his class - to free America from Spanish colonialism, why a poet,
writer of sweet verse, (Jose Marti) met his death from a gunshot in
Dos Rios why the one that our people would baptize as America's Poet
[Pablo Neruda] preferred the political platform to the dusty
libraries, the wine of the workers to flattery, why an Argentine
doctor from the upper middle class [Ernesto Guevara] wound up buried
in a grave with no headstone a thousand miles from his homeland,
after having given up everything in favor of human dignity. There
were not just a few men and women like this, but so many that it
would be unjust to attempt to name them. They were the best and the
most humble, the ones with out flaw, those colored by urgency, men of
flesh and bone like ourselves. They are the measure not only of what
an intellectual should be but also of what every child of this land
should be.
Those who rose from our people to become part of an elite of
Olympic gods knew the limitations of words and, in many cases, took
up arms to defend their verses, their subversive dreams, the dignity
of their race. They achieved what we should all aspire to: no one
could differentiate between their work, their thought, and their
practice.
For them and in their name I would like to say clearly to the
proconsuis and vice- roys, to their lackeys and lieutenants, that you
will not be able to destroy our tender- ness nor our dream, nor much
less our sword. Let those who want to, be post- modern, we'll keep
on being Americans. " JC
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