Anti-system and Specialized Social Movements
The phenomenon of la violencia cannot be understood outside the framework of social movements, if we work with the hypothesis that such phenomena conforms in a significant measure to the Durkheimian model outlined above, relating—at the practical level and also at the collective consciousness level—bandolerismo, mafias, and guerrilla movements.
Yet la violencia cannot be understood either within the framework of the new social movements, simply because la violencia in many of its historical moments is not a social movement by any definition of it, and also because the guerrillas do not operate on the basis of solving any one specific social problem, not even poverty and inequality. The analytical ingredient needed here is the concept of “anti-system movement” (Wallerstein 1975, 1984), which derives from the Marxian notion of revolutionary movement. Here, however, we do not imply either the class notion in Marx, or the world system one in Wallerstein.The recent history of the guerrilla warfare in Colombia can be classified as an antisystem movement, in the sense that, rather than targeting a specialized problem area, it focuses on the global political and economic system. Of course the specific elements of the proposed changes rarely, if ever, are defined. Yet, the guerrilla movements up to the present have represented an unconditional and unpredictable break with the entire system of legitimate authority relations, whether political, economic, or religious.
It is important to indicate here that the anti-system nature of the movement in question conforms to the pre-political-to-political dynamics, identified in Latin American social movements literature, especially in the 1980s (Costella 1992). The pre-political face is characterized by a lack of a holistic view of the social problematic, much in the sense of the new specialized movements.
The political face, on its part, presumes the development of a systemic or holistic view, and assumes that the solution of any given problem ultimately derives from a systemic change orchestrated at the level of the overall political system. The new social movements represent, in this sense, a regression of the social agency process to the “pre-political” level, not in the sense that new social movements avoid the political struggle to promote their views and ends, but in the sense of accepting, or at least resigning themselves to, the western style of electoral/multi-party democracies around the capitalist economic system, and operating within such a context.This notion of the transition from the pre-political to the political character of social movements is quite consistent with the Durkheimian model, even though such an affinity was never identified in that literature, which virtually always rej ected any Durkheimian theoretical inputs as “positivistic” and conservative. Actually, what separates Durkheim's model from the Marxist one is the “substantialism” of the latter as compared to the rationalism of the former (Johnson et al. 1984). One subscribes to a material dialectics behind the dynamics of social consciousness, whereas the other subscribes to ideal or representational dynamics. The Marxist model has to account for an elusive mechanical determination of social consciousness from economic conditions, however lagged, in an externally determined trajectory model of social ideologies. The Durkheimian approach postulates only the internal dynamics of (social) moral density for social groups and leaves opened the actual historical paths, as we saw.
Now, the anti-system character of the movement has two important consequences for our analysis. The first is that the opposition and counter-strategies to the anti-system movements tend to be much more forceful and radical, and not amenable to compromising, compared with the reaction to, and bargaining possibilities of, specialized social movements, including those with civil disobedience strategies such as the MST (landless movement) in Brazil.
This is simply because the former threatens the entire order of the social fabric, whereas the latter represents a threat only to a fraction of it. The government, as the only legitimate monopolistic holder of violence means and its armed—and not armed—forces, reacts with its maximum force against anti-system—that is, anti-government—threats.The second consequence is the very low predictability of the continuing growth of the Colombian guerrilla movement, in the face of a rather decadent status of systemic “insurrectional” ideologies in the present state of development of global capitalism. It is in this sense that the Colombian guerrillas case is particularly striking. After the downfall of Soviet Socialism, other remaining socialist regimes in the world are generally taken to be either in a collision course, or in a peaceful transformation into electoral multi-party democracies of the western style, however slowly, even the case of China. It seems all a matter of time. How then can not only the persistence but the continuing growth of the Colombian guerrillas, socialist/communist in principle, and non-electoral in struggle strategy, be explained?
The democratic ideal and widespread recognition of everyone's place as a citizen in the global civil society was undeniably set as an irreversible trend at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, the most recent literature on, and practice of, social movements focuses rather on the “new” ones, characterized by specialized problem issues, such as gender, race, environmental, and sexual preference issues. Even social class movements, as in the work of Eric Wright, as it subscribes to electoral democracies, sees its fighting arena significantly specialized, as can be noted already in the title of a recent publication: “Class Counts' (1997) (emphasis mine).
Yet, independently of how definite this “end” of history trend might be, there remain in the world many instances where the critique of the political structure and process are approached by many in a holistic manner. This is because of the presence of either openly non-democratic regimes or of fundamental flaws in the party and electoral systems. This does not mean, of course, that in any given case systemic political change has to be or is going to be approached by violent means. But it is clear that the world is still very far from having extirpated violent attempts to systemic change.
Thus, anti-system movements, or “holistic approaches to moral (re)construction” as we should call them here, are being atomized by the impact of the “new social movements” of the first world, which regard the workings of their political systems as tolerable or necessary evils, at worst. From the point of view of Colombian social violence, the cyclical historical pattern of la violencia helps explain the questions raised here.