Factores de riesgo

Modern Feudalism… or Semi-Feudalism?

Haya and Mariátegui also shared the consideration of feudalism as a social model imported to Latin America by Spanish conquest, superimposed upon and eventually spoiling the former setting of primitive communism. In Haya’s terms,

“[t]he conquest brings a new system, but cannot extinguish the former. Imported feudalism does not accomplish a task of integral evolution. It is juxtaposed to the autonomous system and becomes coexistent with it.” (1977b: 200–01) By means of the independence revolutions, the emancipated feudal class captured political power by economic reasons, mirroring the capitalist classes of central countries;

78 however, it “preserves the feudal type of social organization, adds free trade to it, and adapts republican regimes –copies of the European revolutionary methods of the period– to its new autonomous organisms.” Feudalism is thus the social system that characterizes Latin America well until current times, when imperialist capitalism comes to reinforce the it: “British imperialism first and North American […] have more and more heavily laced up the feudal apparatus of our countries.”

(Ibid.)

Conversely, Mariátegui in the Essays uses the term ‘semi-feudalism’ along with, and perhaps confusingly with, that of feudalism. I argue that the idea of semi-feudalism is here not so much an analytical category, but rather a form of relativizing or suspending the meaning of the notion of ‘feudalism’ itself, so as to try a new usage. In other words, the reference to semi-feudalism is projected upon the

“feudalism of the gamonales” (1974: 22), a very specific and concrete phenomenon, as we will see immediately. Consequently, it should not to be translated into any general category. This is implicitly asserted in the following comparison: “Within European feudalism, the elements of growth –the factors of town life– were, in spite of the rural economy, much greater than within Creole semi-feudalism.” (1974: 18, trans. modified) Although unsystematically, Mariátegui tried to keep distance from straightforward usages implying similarities among evidently dissimilar processes, taking instead into consideration the concrete particularities of each situation.

One of the most particular features of Peru’s social system at Mariátegui’s time rested on ‘gamonalismo’. Flores Galindo explains that the etymological root of the word comes from gamonito, a plant that lives parasitically from other plants and trees. Flores Galindo goes on to explain that “The term ‘gamonal’ is a Peruvianism coined during the last [i.e., nineteenth] century, which searched to establish a simile between a parasitic plant and the landowners. […] The term designated the existence of the local power: the privatization of politics, the fragmentation of control and its exercising at the town- or province-scale.” In this vein, Mariátegui gives the term a broader analytical meaning:

The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category: that of the latifundistas and large landowners. It signifies a whole phenomenon. Gamonalismo is represented not only by the

79 gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries, agents, parasites, and so forth. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hegemony of the semi-feudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government. (1974: 30)

Gamonalismo as social phenomenon lasted in Peru until well into the second half of the past century. Jesús Chavarría (1979: 115) has argued that it corresponds to the point of intersection of class and race in Peru. Jorge Oshiro points out in turn that it was a practice at once oppressive and integrative, and that in this ambivalence rest its importance. On the one hand, gamonalismo is the tyrannical exercise of power upon the Indian, either by the landowner or by one of his foremen – not infrequently an indigenous person. The latter, a sort of “second-type gamonal”

(Oshiro, 2013: 435) – the subaltern who nonetheless oppresses his fellows – appears on the other hand as “the true nexus for the oligarchy to control the indigenous masses” (2013: 436). This second-type gamonal was affectively tied to the indigenous culture; not only that: the more the gamonal identified himself with the Indian, the more he was eager to oppress him or her.

Gamonalismo can be seen in consequence as a form of integration and subalternisation at the same time; for Oshiro, it was paradoxically “the only social instance where Hispanic and indigenous cultures were relatively integrated, which is why it enjoyed a sort of consent by those it exploited themselves.” (Ibid.) As one might say today, it was a form of biopolitical power – not just an economic or social subjection – insofar as it performed and was performed by corporal and subjective dispositions of the agents, beyond their class or ethnic adscription.⁴⁴

Given the dominance of landowners and gamonales, both Mariátegui’s and Haya’s accounts consider the nineteenth century’s revolutions of independence in Latin America as events close to what Gramsci termed ‘passive revolutions’, that is, revolutions from above, without popular participation.⁴⁵ In the Essays, Mariátegui

44 José María Arguedas’ novel Todas las Sangres, published in 1964, remains perhaps the best literary representation of this institution.

45 In reference to the Italian process, Gramsci explained that “the historical fact that popular is missing from the development of Italian history, as well as the fact that ‘progress’

occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses –a reaction consisting in ‘restorations’ that agree to some parts of the

80 explains that the independence war “was another political event. It, too, did not bring about a radical transformation in the economic and social structure of Peru:

but it initiated, notwithstanding, another period of our history.” (1974: 29) The period initiated by these independence wars took the form of a revolution from above which did not radically alter the economic structure of these countries, and that has implied in Latin America the postponement of national and democratic demands. The non-resolved tasks supposedly attached to a bourgeois revolution – the liquidation of large land estates, the liberation of the peasants from bondage, and the consequent democratization of the nation – remain for both Mariátegui and Haya the most urgent issues to be solved in these countries.

Haya de la Torre: Imperialism as ‘Arrhythmic’ Capitalism Passive revolutions are thus the historical background for imperialist penetration in Latin America. In Haya’s account, imperialist forces acquire in these countries the role of class-interests and impulses, thus replacing a proper bourgeois class.

Therefore, under imperialism the bourgeoisie remains “an ‘invisible’ class. It is the same big bourgeoisie of powerful distant countries”. Consequently, “imperialism fulfils in them [Latin American countries] the function that the grand bourgeoisie does in the economically more highly developed countries.” (1977a: 152) Local oligarchies, largely embedded in feudal strata, take up the interests of imperialist capitals and match them with their own. As a consequence, Latin American productive forces are arrested in this imbalance, brought to a standstill, with no ability to unleash the enormous wealth of the continent, thus retarding the development of its peoples. If capitalism – Haya goes on – is the rule of the anarchy of production, imperialism represents such anarchy but exacerbated a fact that amounts to slowing down the Latin American economic structures.

This perspective is not far from a certain evolutionist Marxism, in which a stageist succession of economic phases is required for a country to be ‘ripe’ for a socialist revolution. Arguing for the historical necessity of capitalism, Haya declares that “the proletarian, socialist revolution will come later. It will come when our popular demands and are therefore ‘progressive restorations’, or ‘revolutions-restorations’, or even ‘passive revolutions’” (2011: 252; see also Thomas, 2010: 145–46)

81 proletariat is a distinct and mature class, able to lead by itself the transformation of our peoples. But this will not occur until much later.” (1977b: 154) Nonetheless, Haya distances himself from Marxism, particularly from its Leninist version, setting out instead a ‘neo-Marxist’ thesis: imperialism would be not the last but the first stage of capitalism in Latin America. In a decisive passage, he explains that “what is in Europe ‘the last stage of capitalism’, in Indo-America proves to be the first one.

For our peoples, the immigrated or imported capital sets the initial stage of their modern capitalist age”. The central critical reference here is, of course, Lenin’s Imperialism (1996 [1917]). About that pamphlet, however, Haya seems to be only concerned with the image of a sequential order cast by Lenin’s work, and barely, if at all, with the argument about imperialism’s global mechanisms (cf. 1977b: 18–9).

‘Imported’ by imperialism to Indo-America in a process that combines economic exploitation and national subjugation, capitalism has been the source of distortions in what could otherwise be a ‘normal’ development: imported capitalism provokes

“the dual character of our economy, which imperialism splits in two intensities, two rhythms, two modes of production –the backward national one and the accelerated imperialist one” (1977b: 24).

Haya proposes a sui-generis perspective on capitalist development while claiming the necessity of what Marx called its ‘harsh tributes’. The Peruvian leader explains that “the capitalist system, of which imperialism is the highest expression of plenitude, represents a mode of production and a degree of economic organization superior to all the rest the world has known before, and in consequence the capitalist form is a necessary step, an inevitable period in the process of contemporary civilization” (1977b: 16) The crucial problem for Latin American countries is situated in the non-linear and therefore ‘uneven’

development, evident in what he suggestively calls the violent juxtaposition of economic systems. (1977b: 155) The conclusion drawn from this perspective is worth citing at length:

Two kinds of economy –two speeds, two economic intensities– interplay in Indo-American social life. One forming part of the system of big capitalism, subject to a more intense rhythm, whose origin and command are alien to us; and the other forming our own slower and incipient kind of national development. Within the large capitalist

82 system, the latter represents the distant stage of the initial paths; the former, the culminating and powerful forms of modern plenitude and overflow. Thesis and antithesis which impose a synthesis of equilibrium and freedom within the plan of a new Indo-American economy, not excluded from the worldwide economic-social evolution, but capable of halting forever imperialism’s subjugation and oppression.

In order to achieve such a synthesis of equilibrium and freedom, a double and simultaneous task is mandatory –to boost and accelerate the evolution in those backward zones of our economy; to vigorously and definitively stop and reject imperialism’s progresses. (1977b: 215)

Robert Paris (1984: 5) has acutely noted that this ‘first stage’ thesis brings to mind the ongoing rapacity of capitalist forces in the ‘periphery’, putting into evidence the present nature of an everlasting process of primitive accumulation – what Roger Bartra called “permanent primitive accumulation” (1993: 33). Primitive accumulation does not represent a stage of capitalism left behind in time, but its present time in so-called backward zones of the globe, notably in the Global South.

However, I contend that the sentence has also another meaning in Haya’s perspective, one which refers to the necessity of a certain degree of foreign capital as a salutary, even necessary fact in order to boost the productive forces in these countries. “Let’s repeat” – Haya says – that “within the dialectic of the world capitalist system, our countries have no possible liberation. Imperialism is a stage of capitalism –as I have already repeated, it is the culminating one. Our countries are in the first stages of capitalism or going toward them.” (1977b: 156) Therefore, in the political discourse of Haya de la Torre there lies a manifest deep ambiguity about the role of foreign capital as capital, something which conversely undermines his criticism to imperialist capitalism: “it is necessary to combat imperialism, but certain doses of it seem to be required…” (Ibid.)

This ambiguity was transferred into APRA’s political program. Such a program made the case for an ‘anti-imperialist state’ able to counteract (first in a defensive moment, later as a ‘war state’) imperialist forces. Later on, this new nation-state will be the ‘proxy’ of local, developing capitals at the international markets. Insofar as these national capitals are incipient, Haya goes on, to postulate a

83 definitive delinking from foreign capital is an unreal policy. That is why the anti imperialist state must be strong enough so that to limit the amounts of, and the branches in which, foreign capitals are invested, safeguarding thus national interests (cf. Haya de la Torre, 1977a, ch. VII; also 1973, part III). As it was seen, the proletariat is deemed to suffer a similar process: given the precociousness of the working classes in this continent, “an Indo-American anti-imperialist party cannot be of an exclusive class […] it must be a national party of united front, grouping all social classes threatened by imperialism.” (Haya de la Torre, 1977a: 96) As soon as the anti-imperialist state has been stabilized, “the three classes oppressed under imperialism – our young industrial proletariat, our vast and ignorant peasant and our impoverished middle classes – will constitute the normative social forces of this state.” (1977a: 23)

In sum, from the viewpoint of Latin America’s condition as composed by a retarded capitalist development and an immature proletariat, Haya promoted a multi-class party under middle class hegemony as the organization capable of both seizing power and driving a state so as to channel the immature capitalist economy to its higher stages, within the frame of a more harmonized and fairer world market.

We will return in the next chapter to the theoretical grounds of this perspective.

Suffice to highlight by now the fact that Haya seems to combine in his account a noticeable sensibility towards different developmental rhythms with a stark economic determinism. In doing so, he envisaged the hetero-temporality of world capitalism at the same time that he blocked this insight by means of a linear temporality in which the sequence of primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism was considered as one linking inevitable historical phases. In other words, the plurality of tempos or rhythms that the experience of uneven and combined development arguably yielded in his more analytical works as well as his political projects becomes something of an arrhythmia when imperialism is considered as a mere transposition of phases disturbing a normal, spontaneous capitalist development.

84 Mariátegui and the Formation of a ‘Post-Colonial’ Class Consciousness Mariátegui held an understanding of imperialism in contradistinction with Haya’s and closer to what Lenin called the ‘superstructure’ of capitalism in its highest stage.

Right after the APRA division in which both Peruvian leaders inaugurated the polemic between Aprismo and Marxism (a polemic whose presence in Peru’s politics lasted until well into the second half of the past century), in September 1928 the editorial of the 17^th issue of Amauta expressed the difference in the following terms:

The epoch of free competition in the capitalist economy has ended in all fields and all aspects. We are in the age of monopolies, that is to say, empires. The Latin American countries arrived too late to capitalist competition. The first positions are already definitively assigned. In the capitalist order, the destiny of these countries is that of simple colonies.

(Mariátegui, 2011: 129)

Denying the possibility of a harmonious capitalist world market from which an

‘anti-imperialist state’ could benefit, Mariátegui adopts Lenin’s conception of imperialism as the stage in which competition shifts from the national to the international setting. The end of competition means more precisely the end of ‘free’

competition; heretofore, capitals unfolded through larger unities (trusts, cartels), taking the state over and orienting it towards the rest of the world by means other than ‘economic’ – i.e. political and military. This stage of inter-state competition builds itself up as the ‘superstructure’ of the world system, thus determining regional and national conjunctures. In this sense, revolutionaries must deal with a superstructure which is no longer ‘just’ national. And this is precisely the problem faced by the so-called colonial and semi-colonial nations. Despite the apparent rigidity that the idea of the ‘colonial and semi-colonial’ achieved in the Communist discourse of that time, in Lenin’s Imperialism the term functions as a way to distinguish formal (political) colonies from nations that, while formally independent, display varied forms of economic dependence and extra-economic fragility.⁴⁶ Accordingly, Peru – and Latin America broadly speaking – was

46 A partial account on the idea in the Comintern debates, with particular references to Latin America, can be found in Manuel Caballero (1986: 45–6; see also Part Two), in which the author enumerates the Comintern’s outline of semi-colonial condition as a specific form

85 understood by Mariátegui as part of this semi-colonial world; yet the specificity of this region’s history should not be eclipsed by such a status: Latin America’s trajectory of coloniality needed to be closely considered in order to derive a political strategy from its post-colonial condition.

In a well-known and much-discussed statement of Seven Interpretive Essays, Mariátegui depicted the Peruvian economic structure, asserting that

elements of three different economies coexist in Peru today. Underneath the feudal economy inherited from the colonial period, vestiges of the indigenous communal economy can still be found in the sierra. On the coast, a bourgeois economy is growing in feudal soil; it gives every indication of being backward, at least in its mental outlook (1974: 16).

This assertion is only superficially akin to Haya’s image of juxtaposed economic rhythms: what the latter reckons as an overlapping of different stages (times) in a single place (space), in Mariátegui becomes the coexistence and mutual co-belonging of the ‘archaic’ and the ‘modern’, whose interplaying defines a concrete totality. There are thus three different kind of productive relations –modern waged labour, serfdom, and communal work. The latter corresponds to the ‘elements of practical socialism’ embodied in still-alive ayllus. Conversely, waged labour had been largely deployed by foreign capitals, mainly in the export sector such as the northern coastal agriculture (cotton and sugar), the extractive sector in the highlands (coal) and the coast (oil), railway building, and banking and commerce.

Finally, feudal gamonalismo exhibited a presence which extends even into allegedly modern industries such as coastal haciendas, thanks to hook-indenture (enganche) and yanaconazgo.⁴⁷ In an illuminating passage, Mariátegui describes those forms of semi-proletarianization:

Through hook-indenture and yanaconazgo, the large proprietors block the appearance of free-wage contracting, a functional necessity to a of dependency to foreign capital, a rigid idea of feudality, and a correspondent uniform political tactics.

47 Yanaconazgo, was a residual element coming from the economic and social structure of the late Tawantinsuyu, preserved by the Spanish empire, a form of serfdom in which the Indian was attached to land and served directly to the ruler. As Mariátegui and Castro pozo demonstrated, yanaconazgo was transformed in the Republican period, however it did not disappear.

86 liberal and capitalist economy. Indenture, which prevents the labourer from disposing of his person and his labour until he satisfies the obligations he has contracted with the landlord, is unmistakably

86 liberal and capitalist economy. Indenture, which prevents the labourer from disposing of his person and his labour until he satisfies the obligations he has contracted with the landlord, is unmistakably