Utopian Movements, Enactments and Subjectivities among Youth in the Global South

Ethnographic Perspectives

Oscar Salemink, Susanne Bregnbæk, Dan Vesalainen Hirslund, Oscar Salemink, Susanne Bregnbæk, Dan Vesalainen Hirslund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000710885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

Drawing on fine-grained ethnographies from Bissau, Chile, China, Egypt, Ecuador and Nepal, this volume explores how politically, religiously and (sub-)culturally inspired Utopias motivate youth in the Global South to imagine, enact and embody what was missing in the past and present.

As a fluid age cohort and a social category between childhood and adulthood – and hence with tenuous links to the status quo – youth are variously described as 'at risk', as victims of precarious and unpredictable circumstances, or as agents of social change who embody the future. From this future-oriented generational perspective, youth are often mobilised to individually and collectively imagine, enact and embody Utopian futures as alternatives to reigning orders that moulded their subjectivities but simultaneously fail them. The contributions to this book look at how divergent Utopias inspire strategies, whereby young people come together in transient communities to 'catch' a fleeting future, cultivate alternative subjectivities and thus assume a sense of minimum control over their life trajectories, if only momentarily.

As youth enact and embody their aspirations for the future in the present, this book will be of interest to those researching how utopian visions shape practices and subjectivities of youth in the present. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

Dan V. Hirslund

ABSTRACT
This article investigates the changing role of youth in Nepali Maoism following their transformation from a guerrilla army to a parliamentary party after 2006. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how the category of youth gained renewed relevance after the war and allowed the Maoist movement to sidestep complicated issues of class in the urban fabric. Building on a Gramscian framework of subaltern politics and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism’, I argue that youth in the post-revolutionary context have become aligned with the political project of building ‘New Nepal’ and that this allows youth, as both a category and a subject position, to emerge as tools for utopian communist politics. Through an analysis of a divided class landscape in Kathmandu, the article documents the new and difficult alignments between Maoist ideals and positions of youth in the city with lasting outcomes for the party’s revolutionary project.

Youth ambiguities

[We] request all the young of the world to participate in a great debate about the positive and negative aspects and challenges of the Nepalese revolution and the world revolution. We expect that the debate will focus on the power of the young to change the defensive situation of the world Proletarian class into [an] offensive one by raising the red flag over the world […] We want to advance hand-in-hand with the youth of different countries; with youth who want a new world. (Maoist leader of the Nepalese Young Communist League, ‘Sonam’ 2008)

The basic clay of our work is the youth. We place our hope in them and prepare them to take the banner from our hands. (Che Guevara [1968] 2009, 27)

It is difficult not to note within the history of the left-revolutionary fascination with youth a certain paradox. The power of young people to break with tradition and a culture tied to ‘bourgeois’ values, their openness towards the ‘new’ and their historic role as the generation of the future must be combined with enlightened guidance from the older generations. Mao wrote in 1953 about his concern for young cadres’ over-enthusiasm (Mao 1953) and Lenin instructed his party delegates in 1920 that the foremost duty of youth could be summed up in a single word: learn (Lenin 1920). There is an unresolved tension in these ideas between youth as the vanguard of the new and youth as students of the knowledge and experience of an older generation to which they must be submissive. What is missing in the Maoist leader’s vision above about the utopias of youth in a cross-cultural horizontal ‘debate’ is clearly expressed in Che Guevara’s metaphor of youth as clay: they have to be formed before they can become agents of the future. The potentialities of youth as revolutionary figures attest to a certain duplicity of political agency: on the one hand latent, on the other hand concrete.

In this article, I explore the politics of youth and revolution through an analysis of urban Nepali Maoism in a context of peace since a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in November 2006. Nepali Maoism came to the fore with the mobilisation of rural youth in a violent struggle against centuries of sociopolitical exclusion in early 1996 (Ghimire 2002) when a ‘People’s War’ was launched. By 2006, fatigued by a decade of underground conflict, marginalised by an international coalition against ‘terrorism’ and following on a people’s democratic movement in April 2006, the Maoist party (CPN-M) came above ground and entered into a prolonged peace process involving elections to a Constituent Assembly and the drafting of a new republican constitution, which was only finalised in September 2015. CPN-M’s shift to parliamentary politics has been bumpy and resulted in a party split in 2012 and it has involved significant changes to its conceptualisation of twenty-first century proletarian revolution without abandoning its commitment to class struggle. While CPN-M’s ability to combine class politics with the rise of ethnic grievances in the aftermath of the political liberalisation of the early 1990s is rather well known (Lawoti and Hangen 2012; Sales 2000), the Maoist alliance with the young generation has not received the same kind of analytical attention. This is in spite of the movement having relied specifically on children (HRW 2007; Mikesell 2005) and seeking to institutionalise a culture of war sacrifice (Lecomte-Tilouine 2006) and ‘new socialist man’ sensitivities (Zharkevich 2009b). In the post-war context, the CPN-M mobilisation of youth as the central force for the overthrown of the old political order has continued unabated. Instead of ‘youth with arms’, the movement now sports youth cadres in plain clothes wielding placards, shouting slogans and ‘staying among the people’ rather than hidden away in the jungle. By focusing on how the CPN-M has approached the question of youth as the progressive ‘slot’ for its post-war phase, this article throws light on the complicated relationships between youth, proletarianism and class in the Nepali context.

Coming of age in the era of postcolonial critiques of capitalist-induced underdevelopment, the CPN-M has grown out of South Asian intellectual communism with a strong engagement in questions of national sovereignty and welfare. Politically, it aims for a Maoist New Democracy based on a critique of the cultural foundations of feudal and bourgeois society. Its alliance with youth is therefore two-pronged; they are soldiers and transformers, or cetanako yuwarharu, youth with consciousness. It is this particular ambiguity that interests me here as youth emerge not merely as objects of new power configurations but also as the subject of the very change in which they participate. At the same time, not youth but the proletariat-as-peasant occupies the place of the revolutionary subject in Maoist ideology. This raises important questions about the overlap between youth and class in the context of urban mobilisations, where commercial ideas of youth as consumers have made inroads in the past decades and where processes of precarisation have introduced new class experiences. In such a context, how are alliances between youth and Maoism transformed and how does it affect CPN-M’s larger project of bringing excluded, subaltern groups to power?

Looking at how the CPN-M reformulated their policies of revolution to fit with the cessation of armed struggle, the paper traces how the utopias of revolution merged with utopias of youth to become a centrepiece of Nepali Maoism after 2006. Based on close observation of two different cases of Maoist cadres, I show how a politics around the idea of ‘New Nepal’ allowed for the mobilisation of heterogeneous groups of youth and how this cut across urban class barriers. The material for this analysis stems from ethnographic fieldwork carried out for the most part in 2009 within the CPN-M focusing on cadres of the party’s youth wing, the Young Communist League. The YCL, particularly in the first years of the transition period, occupied a highly contested position within urban Maoism due to its heavy reliance on former combatants and its embroilment in several cases of extortion and violent retaliation against rival party members, not unlike other political youth wings (Skar 2008; ICG 2007). At the same time, the YCL has emerged as the post-war organisation that most vigorously mobilises youth to continued revolutionary action. Its very ambiguity as a key organisation within the Maoist fold attests to the complicated relationship within Nepali Maoism between war and peace, violence and non-violence, confrontation and negotiation. The question of youth as political actors in important ways expresses these ambiguities and points to the need for a historically situated inquiry into the formation of utopias and subjectivities.

Revolution and youth in naya Nepal

Anyone can be a youth. The only thing it requires is bravery [himmat]. The interpretation was suggested to me by an experienced 34-year-old member of the YCL and highlights the social embeddedness of ideas of youth beyond generational markers and personal narratives of becoming (Durham 2000). Youth can connote particular and often conflicting meanings about social positionality which extends the relevance of youth for political action by indicating particular bonds formed between categories of persons and their public engagement (Pigg 1993). This is not to deny the material circumstances confronting young, and particularly uneducated and rural populations, in Nepal, as they have struggled to find a foothold in a competitive economy, leading to unprecedented levels (10% of a population of 28 millions) of outmigration for employment opportunities abroad. Un- and underemployment is now rampant and people aged 15–24 are 2.2 times as likely as so-called adults to be without work, with urban unemployment among the same group at 13% in 2008 (ILO 2010). Meanwhile, youth are categorically excluded from influential positions across societal sectors reflecting a strong gerontological culture that easily categorises political leaders above 40 as ‘youth’. Amanda Snellinger (2009) has shown how youth in politics is primarily experienced as an extended form of waiting for generational vindication and Mark Liechty has humorously claimed that Nepali society does not have a ‘youth problem’ but suffers, rather, from a ‘surplus of adults’ (Liechty 2009, 38).

The new spaces of youth that have arisen in Nepali society, and which have only been strengthened with the post-2006 transition to peace, cannot be exhausted, however, by considering only demographic dynamics or cultural shifts within and between generations. Building on a Gramscian perspective, we might think of the position of youth in an ‘integral state’ as based on competing groups’ abilities to rule through a mixture of coercion and consent (Nilsen 2015). In this view, the agency of particular groups, not just individuals, is deeply embedded within existing power relations, as the ability to influence political processes depend on their circumscribed access to languages and tools of the state. Laura Ahearn’s ethnography (2002) of the rise of teenage romances in relationship to the technologies of letter writing and the concrete apparatus of literacy convincingly illustrates the dependency for shifts in experiences on mediating technologies and policies of the state.

For CPN-M, the newer youth culture and the systematic exclusion of young people from positions of influence are closely related. Already during the armed conflict, their project consisted in mobilising disenfranchised ethnic youth, mainly boys, and providing them with an alternative community of fraternal relations (largely) devoid of caste discrimination and wherein a new culture of solidarity could flourish (Zharkevich 2009a). Maoist leaders were cognisant that attacking an ‘integral state’ in which the dominant languages of membership were allied with the old elite required a distinct politics of utopia that offered new languages and practices of subjectivity. During the war, fraternal bonding developed in extraordinary spaces – jungle camps, extended treks, battle – whereas Maoist cadreship was much more difficult to segregate in an era of ‘open politics’ and where the majority were active participants in society beside their activist engagements. Furthermore, CPN-M is not the only, nor necessarily the dominating, voice for bringing youth under its wings. Civil society organisations, since long interested in questions of marginality, not only have championed against child labour, teen marriages and trafficking but have also begun promoting ideas of youth entrepreneurship as a solution to a stagnant economy and as liberators of a patrimonial political culture centred around old, high-caste men.

The political field in which CPN-M has sought to be a hegemon and establish a new youth culture is thus fiercely competitive, pace Gramsci. Aside from the largely non-political mobilisers of youth – and here it makes sense to include the political economic fabric of the remittance economy (Seddon, Adhikari, and Gurung 2002) – rival political parties have also established, or boosted, their own youth wings through a combination of structures of patronage and promoting ideas about young people as role models for change. The Maoist effort stands out, however, because of its combination of a Gramscian ‘shuffle for power’ approach with a project of resubjectivising youth to a vanguard class-in-the-making, and it is in this sense that CPN-M integrates utopian politics with its more mundane struggles for building an urban movement. The Young Communist League hastily ‘reactivated’, as its leader Ganeshman Pun explained, after the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, combined these two political urges: party building and subjectivity formation. Assembled out of the disintegrations of the Maoist army (PLA) and preoccupied with delivering what was considered ‘social services’, such as road construction or garbage cleaning in congested neighbourhoods, large cohorts of youth were more or less indiscriminately enlisted as volunteers, or swayangsevak, for everyday ‘revolutionary’ work. More than just a resignified organisational role for young movement members, Maoist engagement with ideas of youth had widest traction in their mobilisation policy, which very directly began to target ‘youth with consciousness’ and new party magazines sprouted that began heroising ‘voices of youth’ to showcase the diversity of people who rallied behind the former underground movement.

The new focus on youth took place within larger ideological shifts during the early 2000s from a revolutionary goal of capturing the state to negotiating with the political parties in what was seen as a ‘bourgeois’ transition, opening up for a wider understanding of what progressivity entailed (Adhikari 2010). The CPN-M underwent a turbulent period in response to external political events, reneging on its strategy of confrontation and, in line with liberal and conservative forces, it now accepted the principles of majoritarian democracy with some provisions for minority inclusion. While retaining a rhetoric of socialist revolution, partly so as to appease more critical sections of the party, it began speaking publicly about the goal of creating a New Nepal (naya Nepal), a vision widely shared across the political spectrum, even if it was more a cliché than a programme for change. These significant concessions to the dominant ideological context of non-violence, hierarchical party-politics and the retention of an elitist state apparatus created significant and long-lasting rifts within the CPN-M that deeply shook the shared ideological underpinnings of its leadership.

The shift from war to peace with its expanded and loosened ideological space thus instigated a new politics of utopia for the CPN-M in which youth, signified as progressive and brave, occupied a central place. I employ utopia here to capture a grounded politics of change enunciated within wider ideas about a different sociopolitical order. Expanding on Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope ([1954] 1995), in which he argued for the universal human ability to imagine alternative futures, CPN-M’s politics of youth reminds us of the necessity of locating aspirational politics in present struggles as well. If not, there is a risk that we end up studying utopia as a series of (ideological) claims about the future without connecting them to the material circumstances from which these ideas grow. David Harvey, in a very useful discussion of predominant theories on utopia (Harvey 2000), suggests that most models for the betterment of the human race run aground on their inability to combine what he calls ‘processual’ and ‘spatial’ utopias. The former – to which belongs the liberalism of free-market policies – are not concerned with the materialisation of rea...