Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism in Latin America

The Role of Radical Education

S. Motta, M. Cole

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349341245, 9780230338234
• eBook ISBN: 9781137089212
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education, Motta and Cole explore the role of the politics of knowledge and pedagogy in the reinvention of socialism for the twenty-first century. Through a critical analysis of Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela they deconstruct the mechanisms of neoliberal control as an epistemological project of monologue, closure, and violence against all 'others'. The authors develop an affirmative engagement with the traditions, practices, and politics which seek to challenge this closure through the policies of the counter-hegemonic government of Venezuela, the struggles of social movements in Brazil and Colombia, and the daily resistance of critical educators working in formal educational settings in all three countries. This mapping and analysis not only contribute to struggles for alternatives to capitalism in Latin America, but are translatable to other contexts. The book theorizes that with the exhaustion of neoliberalism, it is time to pedagogize the political and politicize the pedagogical in order to create worlds beyond capitalism.

Part I

Epistemological Hegemonies and Counterhegemonic Epistemologies in, against, and beyond the Capitalist State

Chapter 1

Militarized Neoliberalism in Colombia: Disarticulating Dissent and Articulating Consent to Neoliberal Epistemologies, Pedagogies, and Ways of Life

Sara C. Motta

The regime of the Uribe governments (2000–2010) entrenched exclusionary, militarized forms of domination. Notably, the initial passive revolutionary form of neoliberalism was developed into a fragile and highly contradictory neoliberal hegemony during this period. It was articulated in a populist militarized form in which institutional mechanisms, ideological practices, and epistemological logics attempted to articulate the hegemonic educator as a passive, fragmented, and deprofessionalized subject and the student as an individualized, consumer, and depoliticized subject. However, the continued levels of coercion and eradication against all “others” created the conditions for these external others to continue to develop critical, antiauthoritarian pedagogical-political projects throughout Colombian society (to be explored in chap. 6).

This chapter contextualizes and conceptualizes the populist militarized neoliberalism of the governments of Uribe and, now, that of Santos (2010–present). It then analyzes the epistemological logics, pedagogical practices, and institutional mechanisms through which Uribe attempted to disarticulate dissent and articulate consent to imperial monological knowledge subjects, a commodified pedagogy of results and neoliberal way of life.

Colombia has experienced militarized conflict since the 1960s. Globally and regionally it has poverty and inequality rates that rank among the highest. The nexus of conflict and coercion between the internationalized state and Colombian society sits within a broader political economy of exclusionary developmentalism and neoliberalism in which its vast deposits of coal, oil, gold, emeralds, nickel, and fertile agricultural terrain enable the transnationalization of an export producing economy where profits go to transnational economic elites and national political elites (Bermúdez, 2013; Stokes, 2005). The US continual support for the militarized disciplinary state is partially explained by its geopolitic location in which Colombia sits at the crossroads both by land and by sea to a range of crucial transnational communication links. Political violence has been a constant feature of state-civil society relations for decades with the bullet and the bomb as the preferred options for conflict resolution. Here war as politics and politics as war are in continuum.

The historic bloc of both developmentalism and neoliberalism has comprised political and economic elites (who have had privileged access and relationships with state and political representatives in the making of policy) with the support of the United States. They have developed sophisticated mechanisms, systems, and justifications for relationships with the popular classes. These have been premised upon and articulated through the disarticulation of dissent and the systematic elimination of opposition. Paradigmatic of this nexus of coercive power are the paramilitaries that were set up in the 1960s—with military support and US guidance—by large landowners as a means of protection against guerrilla incursion and to suppress demands for land reform. During the 1990s they were well armed and funded and prosecuted leftist insurgents and their alleged social base. They have complex and conflicting relationships with drug cartels, particular local elite interests, and sections of the military. At the time of neoliberal restructuring, which augments inequalities and exclusions, their relationship with the government was strengthened and legitimized in the name of popular self-defense when President Samper legalized setting up of armed self-defense organization known as CONVIVIR (Servicios Especiales de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada). While these were officially “disbanded” in 1998, they went on to form the illegal AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia). The government denies continued links but human rights and solidarity organizations have demonstrated clear evidence of their links through either informal military involvement in their activities or active noninterference in their operations (Bermúdez, 2013; Novelli, 2010).

Arguably the form of capitalist reproduction during these periods is one of passive revolution in which a dominant transnational coalition of forces is unable to guarantee hegemonic consent manifested in the emergence and consolidation of armed guerrillas and an overreliance on mechanisms of domination as opposed to consensus. Political violence thus marks the relationships of the hegemonic historic bloc of both developmentalism and its transformation into neoliberalism with the popular classes. When the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo) in 1985, for example, attempted to enter electoral politics, over three thousand of its members were murdered within a decade (Stokes, 2005). The conflict in recent decades is fueled by the international drugs trade and by the geopolitic strategies of the United States in the region that have consistently provided training in counterinsurgency, funding, and materials to the Colombian government and its linkages with paramilitary forces. The particular form of passive revolutionary developmentalism in Colombia and its authoritarian and coercive relationship with sectors of the popular classes has been augmented in the 1990s by neoliberal restructuring, which included policies of austerity, deregulation, and privatization. The facts are brutal: there is an estimated three million people internally displaced, political homicides per annum range between three thousand and six thousand, and Colombia has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world.

The politics of militarization and militarization of politics has impacted upon the everyday forms of state violence that excluded Colombian communities’ experience, both in the shantytowns of urban areas and rural areas at the heart of conflict. The violence is also manifested in the way that everyday forms of conflict within the popular classes are mediated and articulated. Thus, it has been described as a parastate that exists beside the formal state, which exercises sustained and targeted levels of repression (Brittain, 2006; Stokes, 2005). Globally, for example, Colombia has the highest rate of trade unionist murders and levels of death threats, displacement, torture, and disappearances (Novelli, 2010; for further details, see http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/about-colombia/). Dominant militarized neoliberalism works to disarticulate the formation of alternative subjectivities, social relationships, and frameworks of the world.

Within this context of passive revolutionary transformation of developmentalism into neoliberalism, the role of educators and education is pivotal as a place in which repression and coercion is enacted, and practices of hegemonic construction created. It is also a space of the formation of counterhegemonic subjectivities, social relationships, and emancipatory horizons. The Colombia constitution of 1991 is contradictory in this regard. In a broader context of a political economy shift toward neoliberal accumulation strategy in which critical educators are subject to the coercive force of the formal and parastate education was defined as “a person’s right and a public service that has a social function. With education a man would be able to search for access to knowledge, science, technology and the rest of goods and values of the culture” (Colombian Constitution, 2009, cited in Cadavid et al., 2010, p. 191). It was also made compulsory and the responsibility of family, state, and community, for children aged been 5 and 15 to attend school. While public schools were free of cost, in the same constitution, however, the privatization of public services and state activities was institutionalized (Hernandez, 2004, p. 64). And as Novelli demonstrates in his research (2010, p. 279), “Neoliberalism has been the catalyst for intensifying repression against educators both directly and indirectly.” This is because as professionals they can reproduce the obedient hegemonic subject yet they have also historically and in the present been at the forefront of liberation movements and the development of pedagogies and epistemologies of insubordination and emancipation.

Militarized, Populist Neoliberalism in the Twenty-First Century

The election to Uribe to power in 2002 marks a moment of the consolidation of an elitist neoliberal historic bloc and their ability, through Uribe, to develop a populist and fragile hegemonic neoliberalism with high levels of support from ordinary Colombians. This nexus between an elitist transnational historic bloc and large sectors of the informal sectors, concomitant with fostering of the deepening of the neoliberal restructuring of society, is common to the continent. Such a conjuncture constituted the possibilities for the articulation of consent to neoliberalism and the intensification of the disarticulation of dissenting voices.

Uribe presented himself as an outsider from the traditional political elite. This was a pivotal political move as the political class had lost much of its legitimacy through political and economic crisis and stagnation. He like many fellow neoliberal populists represented himself as of the people, against the corrupt elites, and sought to institutionalize direct relationships with the populace in the name of democracy on the back of deinstitutionalizing the Colombian state. He ruled by referendum and instituted changes in the institutional structure. He also enacted fiscal austerity to comply with International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposals, for example, repealing of the special pension’s provisions and a freezing of state salaries (Cepeda, 2003, p. 2).

He further dedemocratized the state by bypassing institutional channels and checks and balances, creating informal institutional networks of decision making and appointing representatives of the business community such as Jose Roberto Arrango to key advisory positions. A new round of privatization of public services, including contracting out, were carried out under Consejo Superior de Política Economica y Social (CONPES), which was headed by the president with his ministers, the head of the Central Bank, and representatives from the private sector (Hernandez, 2004, p. 64). In the name of democracy he personalized and concentrated political power in the hands of the presidency with unelected representatives of transnational elites, a common form of state institutionality in neoliberalism (Teivanen, 2002).

In continuity with past relationships between the state and society, Uribe deepened the militarization of conflict and denial of “other” voices. This was legitimized through a populist discourse of security, stability, and democracy in his “democratic” security agenda. He appointed himself the “first soldier of Colombia” (Cepeda, 2003, p. 4). In his first week in office he declared a “state of internal commotion,” which allowed him to adopt extraordinary measures including the establishment of rehabilitation and consolidation zones covering several provinces; a onetime wealth tax to support strengthening security forces; a discourse articulated around the fight against drugs for its role in fueling conflict; extraditions to the United States; and naming, like the United States, of the FARC as a terrorist group. Such a democratic security agenda was applied throughout his two presidencies to misname and misrepresent opposition as terrorist and the enemies of democratic stability and peace. This discourse of disarticulation of dissent is a common feature of neoliberal hegemony that delegitimizes all ontological, epistemological, and political others, thereby instituting the end of politics and emancipatory horizons outside of those of neoliberal capitalism (Mansell and Motta, 2013; Mendieta, 2008, p. xii; Motta, 2008).

Uribe deepened the elitist historic bloc of neoliberalism through extending the historic influence of the private sector (both national and transnational) in policy making and state relationships with the popular sectors. As Hernandez (2004, p. 57) argues, the business sector and the political class in Colombia “sustain a relationship in which political decisions and public management are permeated by private activity.” Thus, the economic policies of the government (continued under President Santos) have supported preferential agreements with transnational companies and foreign governments, including free-trade agreements with the United States and Canada. Many of these agreements contained clauses that invalidated international treaties that Colombia had previously signed to protect its economy and biodiversity, undermined unions and labor rights, and were detrimental to Colombia’s economy and ecology. As Ramirez (2005, p. 35) describes, these included

tariff rebates, preferential agreements—which are not applied reciprocally to products produced in our country—tax exemptions, tax parity between national and foreign industries, facilitations of profit repatriation, compensations for nationalisation, and special guarantees in the case of lawsuits against transnationals. Cases of litigation between the State and private parties are referred to private arbitration tribunals whose decisions always end up favouring the rights of multinationals over the rights of the national, resulting in enormous losses for the public treasury.

An example of private sector and international influence in policy making in the mineral resources sector is Plan Colombia; a US initiative legitimized as contributing to combating drug trafficking and guerrilla forces. It was lobbied at the US congress by Occidental Petroleum and other US companies that helped finance George Bush’s campaign. The plan required the placement of Colombian military antinarcotics bases in three strategic resource zones of the country: south of Bolivar, where there had been an ongoing dispute between transnational companies and small-scale miners over one of the richest deposits of gold in the world; the second, Norte de Santander, alongside the Cano Likmon-Covenas, an oil pipeline that belongs to Occidental Petroleum; and the final area near Ataco, in Tolima Department where transnational companies have shown interest in the deposits of gold and other precious materials located there. In these areas violent massacres by paramilitary groups, supported by US multinationals, are common occurrences. This is also witnessed in Putumayo where agencies of the US government, paramilitaries, and the Colombian army have acted to protect Harken Energy investment in developing and exploiting one of Colombia’s largest gas reserves. Such policy nexus and legitimization naturalizes consent to intervention and to the neoliberal development strategy, which is represented both as “democratic and progressive.” Thus, Colombia’s attempt at hegemonic construction weaves a lethal combination of discursive representation, economic expropriation, and political violence to create docile and pacified popular classes. As Cepeda Ulloa (2003, p. 10) describes,

Despite unpopular measures adopted in terms of taxes, massive staff layoffs, announcements regarding the abolishment of national, provincial and municipal entities, his public image has grown significantly and thus he maintained high levels of popular public support.

In the area of social policy Uribe launched the Social Reactivation Plan, which had eight pillars: educational reform, social security, social management of the rural sector, social management of public services, creation of a country of property owners, cooperatives, enhanced quality of urban life, and macroeconomic stabilization. The logics underlying the reaction plan were those of privatization, removal and weakening of the public sector, weakening the power of labor, and strengthening a neoliberal disciplinary state in the everyday realities of Colombians lives. As Valencia (2013, pp. 31–33) demonstrates in relation to labor conditions and the creation of cooperatives, Law 798 introduced in late 2002 was represented as giving tax breaks to corporations so that they offered more jobs to unemployed Colombian citizens thereby reducing unemployment. The reform did this through extending working hours (from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.), depriving workers of earning night pay or holiday pay and reducing the amount of termination pay employers must pay in the case of wrongful dismissal; in short, brutal supply-side economics. There was no report from government to verify if the new law did indeed reduce unemployment. Importantly, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Unified Workers’ Central, CUT) with researchers from the National University in Bogota carried out research that demonstrated there was no impact on unemployment; rather the beneficiaries were employers who were saving four trillion Colombian pesos per year by not paying their employees the wages that the 1991 constitution had previously granted them.

Education and/as Epistemological Logics of Neoliberal Capitalist Coloniality

Exploration of educational reform and its underlying epistemological logics in the Uribe and Santos governments demonstrates the continuities and the differences in the Colombian state’s relationship with the popular classes in the neoliberal period—both in its coercive and consensus driven aspects. It is clear that educational politics, practices, and institutions play a pivotal role in the consolidation of a neoliberal disciplinary state. However, what also becomes visible is the pivotal role of education practices, struggles, and experiences in the creation of counterhegemonic epistemologies, subjectivities, social relationships, and ways of life.

The government’s discourse in relation to education reform was couched in the language of modernization, efficiency, and quality as the means to modernize Colombian society through the education of its population into competitive and compliant members of the global workforce and recipients of the “alleged” fruits of globalization. As Light, Manso, and Noguera (2009, p. 5) describe,

Colombia’s leaders believe that education is key to addressing two of the country’s biggest challenges: a) the concern for social pea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction Pedagogizing the Political and Politicizing Pedagogy
• Part I   Epistemological Hegemonies and Counterhegemonic Epistemologies in, against, and beyond the Capitalist State
• Part II   Counterhegemonic Epistemologies and Decolonizing Pedagogies from Below
• Part III   Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism in Latin America and Beyond
• Annexure 1: MANE Methodology of Programmatic Construction of the Alternative Project of Reform of Higher Education
• Notes
• References
• Index