DERECHO A LA INTEGRIDAD PERSONAL Y PROTECCIÓN CONTRA LA VIOLEN- VIOLEN-CIA

Indigenous politics goes beyond ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’ claims, and propose a politics of self-determination. The politics of self-determination, however, is problematic because it implies the transformation of the relation between the state and indigenous peoples. There are basically two paths undertaken by indigenous peoples to achieve this transformation: the exercise of autonomic practices and counter-hegemonic strategies. In this section, I discuss the interpretations of indigenous struggles as counter-hegemonic practices or radical autonomist practices and the possibilities to transcend or not state structures in order to define the place of indigenous politics in society and better understand its relation to state extractive policies.

As explained in Chapter 1, self-determination refers to the socio-political and juridical form of indigenous peoples and autonomy refers to its political-philosophical claim. The claims for autonomy are observed, on the one hand, as claims outside the state, beyond the state or de facto autonomy; and on the one hand, as claims within the state or counter-hegemonic (González, 2010; Burguete, 2010). Whereas the perspective on radical democracy emphasises the second group of claims; the post-Marxist perspectives emphasise the first group of claims.

The Marxist categories of subalternity, antagonism and emancipation are relevant to understand how indigenous autonomy is usually grasped. The conceptual origins of subalternity were proposed by Gramsci, who saw an organic relation of hegemony between the state and civil society. Hegemony is the exercise of domination through political legitimacy, rather than through force (Kennedy, 1982): while force is exerted by repressive institutions (army, police) consent is produced by institutions such as schools, churches, or media. In that context, the subalterns seek a passage from subalternity to a new hegemonic-domination through the communist party (Modonesi, 2010); or - in the appropriation of Gramsci by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) - through radical democratic processes. The liberal-capitalist state is here a necessary intermediation to achieve a new hegemony and the emancipation of the subalterns.

The theoretical notions of antagonism and autonomy originate in the methodological inversion of Italian workerism: the focus is no longer on capital but on the antagonist class. Thus, not only the transformation of capital determines the formation of classes, but this composition impacts directly on the form and power of capital. In Negri, the negative dimension (antagonism, self-valorisation/autonomy) is followed by a positive dimension: the invention of a mode of production not dominated by capital categories.

Antagonism relates to the relational character of the subjectivisation process which derives from the experience of insubordination, whereas autonomy relates to the relatively free condition that makes possible the struggle. In the eighties with the

49 influence of Spinoza, Negri diminished the importance of the category of antagonism because between potestas and potencia there is not a mediation of counter-power, it is replaced by ‘power to do’. Thus, autonomy goes beyond antagonism not only as a process but as category: the subject is not constructed in the struggle, autonomy is a genetic and original feature. What matter then is not the contradiction between workers and capitalists but the autonomic processes of constitution of alternative subjectivities (Modonesi, 2010).

Hence, whereas counterhegemonic projects prioritise the construction of totalising ideas for the whole society and privileges political struggle and participation within political institutions; emancipatory projects seek to subvert the predominant political structure by privileging direct self-determination: “counter-hegemony seeks to create an alternative power, emancipation seeks to end the relations of power” (Ornelas, 2012: p. 149).

Holloway (2009; 2010) radicalises the autonomic project by criticising the understanding of working class as positive subject. According to him, the point of critique must not be the working class instead of capital, but negativity instead of positivity, namely, working class as negation. Denying capital is denying what capital creates: abstract work; consequently, the political struggle is for the emancipation of what has been denied, the free doing. Therefore, class struggle is not the struggle of work against capital, but the struggle of doing against work, the struggle against the whole classificatory construction based on abstract labour.

Holloway applies this theoretical development to the Zapatista uprising. The Zapatistas became visible after the coming into force of the NAFTA agreement in 1994 and the threatening of indigenous land. Zapatistas propose a revolution based on dignity, with no intention to seize state power but to radicalise the democratic process and obtain autonomy beyond administrative decentralisation. They negotiated with the government the San Andres Agreements of 1996, for a constitutional recognition of self-organisation. However, the government implemented ‘free municipality’ which only identified what kind of indigenous authorities were recognised by law and how they should be elected, making any other form of organisation illegal. Hence, beyond state recognition, Zapatistas implemented an authentic system of government exercised by their communities (Esteva and Perez, 2001). By 2003 there were five Zapatista regions in Chiapas where the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee operated. That year, the Zapatistas started a process of demilitarisation of the movement towards the strengthening of civil society, and opened the space for the discussion of autonomy. By 2007 there were 38 Autonomous Rebel Zapatistas Councils (Dinerstein, 2013).

For Holloway (2002), the Zapatista revolution would show that autonomy is not within the state but outside the state. It doesn’t require to take power by force or elections, but to exert direct control on their own political and economic organisation outside the state; otherwise state power would be reinforced. Additionally, the aim is not only to exercise direct autonomy but also to deny the classifications made by capitalism as worker, indigenous, etc. That would be the importance of the Zapatista balaclava: they do not need to expose their identity but the other way around, to present an empty identity that can assimilate other struggles. Holloway argues that this movement struggles against classification.

50 A similar development has been made by Hardt and Negri (2009). According to them, the Zapatistas do not demand the legal recognition of indigenous identities equal to others nor do they claim the sovereignty of traditional indigenous power structures vis-a-vis the state. Although the Zapatistas are predominantly indigenous, their politics would not rest on a fixed identity, thus, they avoid getting stuck in antimodernity and move on to the terrain of altermodernity. For Hardt and Negri (2009) politics based on identity immobilises the production of subjectivity; liberation instead requires taking control of subjectivity production. Identity politics is only useful if directed to its own abolition as queer politics suggests.

Radical autonomists are very influential in the analysis of indigenous struggles (see Albertani et al, 2009). Their main ideas, however, are very controversial. I will focus on the theoretical proposals of indigenous direct autonomy without the state as mediator, and indigenous autonomy as struggle against identity.

Latin American examples would support the claim of direct autonomy outside the state because when indigenous movements engage in counter-hegemony, they remain trapped in the institutional framework of liberal capitalism (see 4.3.3). For Cerdeiras anyone attempting to take the liberal state is likely to end up taken by it: in occupying the state one is simply reconstituting domination/hegemony under a new direction (in Reyes, 2012). In addition, for Reyes (2012) and Ceceña (2012) imagining life beyond the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from the necessity to practice politics beyond the liberal state: obtaining autonomy without mediation is the fundamental basis of strength of different movements and communities.

However, the exercise of autonomic practices without changing the social, economic, and political relations with the state are difficult to achieve. According to Gutierrez (2011, 2012), the total rejection to any capitalist or state element is unlikely to succeed because this rejection becomes a material limit to the development of autonomic politics (Gutierrez, 2011, 2012). Indeed, there is an analytical impossibility of pure autonomy because autonomy is a permanent struggle (Böhm et al, 2012).

Autonomy from indigenous perspectives might entail political practices outside the state or inside the state but never without the state, because autonomy is not self-conceived, it relates to another political subject. Thus, when many indigenous peoples engage in political parties or political institutions within the logic of the state, they are practicing counter-hegemonic strategies to achieve some degrees of autonomy within and in relation to the state; when they recur to non-institutionalised practices such as social mobilisation and direct self-determination, they are practising autonomic strategies in order to achieve also some degrees of autonomy within and in relation to the state. In both cases, the state and liberal capitalism become mediating devices to express the indigenous philosophical impetus (autonomy) and its legal and political form, self-determination.

Regarding the argument about autonomic practices as anti-indentitarian politics, it must be noted that indigenous autonomy cannot entail a struggle against indigeneity. This argument corresponds to a misunderstanding based on the tendency to observe indigenous practices through the eyes of Western theories. Thus, the autonomist allegations of non-identity taken from some Zapatistas mottos are not coherent with

51 indigenous struggles that exactly depend on their identity and positive engagement into politics in order to obtain a certain degree of autonomy.

According to the Aymara intellectual Fernandez (Mignolo, 2011) indigenous mobilisations are not merely about opposition to specific policies, rather they express an indigenous episteme, a system of understanding the world that has a completely different basis for thinking about socio-political relations and practices, based on a model of horizontal solidarity that extends not only to all humans but also to non-humans in the natural and cosmological world. Similarly the indigenous activist Ortíz (2009) argues that whereas autonomy for some is synonymous with utopia, process, legal reform, struggle, etc. for indigenous peoples it is beforehand a form of communitarian life, with the possibility to decide the collective path toward the reconstitution of the peoples and its legal recognition. The Katarist scholar Simon Yampara (2010) argues that there are two paths of autonomy: a subaltern autonomy conditioned by the system on the basis of the current territorial structures, or an indigenous autonomy as a process of decolonisation and liberation directed to re-territorialising the country and reconstituting networks of inter-ecological communality.

In these cases, autonomy is a political principle for the redefinition and constitution of indigenous peoples as peoples with the right to self-determination in ontological/epistemological, politico-legal, and economic terms.

The indigenous decolonial turn is an epistemic and ontological turn. The level of abstraction needed to conceptualise autonomy is even more profound than the post-Marxist approach. Here, the issue is not to disconnect ‘doing’ from ‘labour’, or to react against the colonial imposed category of ‘Indio’. The issue is not to follow the queer aspiration of identity abolition. Most indigenous peoples struggle against the modern project of exclusion or inclusion in political, economic and ontological/epistemological terms. Their primary aim is to disconnect the process of political subjectivity itself from the very Western abstractedness. This decolonial autonomy would provide a platform to discuss with the state and the society the extension of the political in order to truly recognise their political right to self-determination and the respect of their legal and economic organisation.

This project is difficult to achieve in relation to or within the state, but it would be illusory to think that self-determination is possible without the mediation of liberal capitalism. In the following chapter I discuss in more detail the possibilities offered by the encounters between the liberal legality and indigenous peoples, and the violent processes of inclusion/exclusion.

2.5. Conclusion

Western modernity is the ontological and epistemological dimension of liberal capitalism, and liberal legality and the capitalist economy are its regulative dimension.

All of them (modernity, liberalism and capitalism) have a dark side: coloniality, exception and exploitation/dispossession. Marxist analysis has uncovered the dark side of capitalism and Schmitt’s politics has uncovered the dark side of liberalism, but they have not proposed a comprehensive critique of both dimensions. Western epistemology and ontology (that can be summarised in rational humanity and universal knowledge) has been criticised by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism and post-colonial studies, but its radicalisation has only reached a relativist and