Today, the advances achieved during the years of integration, rapprochement, and encounter among the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean seem to have been left behind, and many governments in the region no longer feel ashamed to align themselves with a violent and criminal empire. The mobilizing capacity of the left is declining. Ideals are confined to nostalgia for references that no longer exist. Academia loses itself among endless papers. Political parties exhaust themselves in electoral cycles. It seems as though dreams are wandering alone and hope has been swallowed by bewilderment in the face of barbarism.
U.S. imperialism uses all its power to destroy civilizations and peoples who symbolize rebellion and dignity, with no regard for the very laws it created to dominate the world under the banner of civilization and progress. By denying those laws through force, imperialism reveals the instrumental nature that this order has always had and demonstrates that such laws are no longer capable of preventing the attacks and wars that generate increasing suffering for humanity. The so-called world order, although it once served as a framework for some understanding among nations, cannot offer an answer to the civilizational crisis humanity is facing.
Imperialist expansion now advances on ground prepared by a left that tried to govern for everyone, believed in consensus between classes, and sought to be nationalist without confronting the empire. A left that abandoned the field of ideological dispute, showed difference from its enemies only in tactics, feared the task of leading society, rejected the possibility of overcoming capitalism, and feared the organized people. It fled from conflict, reduced the role of the State and, in doing so, reduced its own social base and diluted its project.
Even so, the popular movements organized through the Campaign for 500 Years of Black, Indigenous, and Popular Resistance, which fought together against the FTAA, expanded the agenda of struggles at the World Social Forum, and later found inspiration in the leadership of Chávez and Fidel within ALBA-TCP, laid the foundation for the victories of Néstor and Cristina in Argentina, Evo in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Lula and Dilma in Brazil. These movements continue to promote practices for a new political culture that has nothing to do with paralyzing horizontalism or grassroots messianism; a political culture, instead, that believes in popular organization, collective leadership, and the necessary leadership of society.
The popular movement that followed this path left behind its reluctance to seize power and now engages in dispute through political strategies developed and implemented locally and nationally. It insists on territorial work, supports and pressures institutions to confront their contradictions, recovers political education, discusses weaknesses in grassroots organizing, articulates processes of unity among peoples, and reflects on themes historically foreign to orthodox Marxism in an effort to understand how subjects were conquered by neoliberalism and drawn into the territory of consumption, competition, and the market as the regulator of existence.
Some questions continue to emerge in the spaces these movements organize. Where are social fabrics formed within these new logics of producing meaning in life? Where can a community be built amid capital’s individualistic logic? Where does the deepest social unease reside, and how is it interpreted? How can we politicize this unease through the consciousness of belonging to a shared experience lived by many people — people who carry similar marks, who witnessed the horror of poverty without being able to escape it despite all their efforts?
These questions can help guide the battle of ideas from the perspective of the working class, rooted in its anxieties and discontent; however, they are not enough.
The left must commit itself to leading society through example. It is not enough to accompany working people, go into communities, and confront transnational corporations, paramilitaries, and everything that threatens the lives of families in the places where the contradictions of capitalism become visible. It is necessary to create ethical and political references capable of guiding these processes without fear of being called socialist, without fear of the communist horizon, with a real commitment for power and victory.
The ideological emptiness of left-wing politics will not be resolved through silence or omission in the face of difficult and delicate issues. It is necessary to debate the associations established by neoliberalism between socialism and dictatorship, poverty, isolation, paralysis, and fragmentation. Imperialism has worked to build these associations through all its instruments: academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, humanitarian aid, and, of course, military bases, tanks, and bombs.
The popular movement that is building a project within ALBA Movements has overcome the induced and formal distancing from political parties and is building dialogue with the São Paulo Forum at the regional level, while creating, in each country, instruments for territorial political work, debating the concept of the party-movement, and understanding that its mission is not limited to denouncing, but to changing reality. To do so, it must be capable of mobilizing popular power, the foundation of the democracy it proposes.
It opposes the orthodoxy of the new left and proudly carries the legacy and lessons of liberation movements, insurgencies, armed struggles, the political forces that came before it, neighborhood leaders disappeared during dictatorships, and the base ecclesial communities. This legacy is recognized as a source of ideological grounding and meaning in struggle. Its trajectory is marked by the blood of the so-called old left, which they tried to defeat and discredit not only because of its mistakes, but above all because of its achievements, its capacity to make a dream into a mass movement. It is necessary to continue recovering this tradition, its aesthetics, its deep relationship with art, and its humanist ethics.
One of the greatest dangers this organized popular movement faces in the region is related to relentless attacks against the State. These attacks, within the economic context of the region, limit the combative potential of these struggles. Without disputing the role of the State as an agent of regulation, redistribution, and, above all, integration of society and production of subjectivity, popular movements would become mere instruments for affirming liberal democracy and would simply witness capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself at the margins of the subversion it is capable of controlling.
When the far right promotes the weakening of the State and transfers its functions to the private sector, seeking to shrink the State and abandon large sectors of the subordinate classes, the option for popular movements cannot be to ally themselves with NGOs linked to capital, however well-intentioned they may appear, to supposedly fill the gaps that should be guaranteed as rights. Nor can the answer be clientelist redistribution that creates consumers instead of citizens. The popular movement must dispute the State, and this goes far beyond preparing for elections; it means occupying spaces of power through mechanisms of accountability and binding mandates for its representatives while simultaneously maintaining the real capacity to serve as a reference for pressure within, with, and against the State, as a force that mobilizes society toward the necessary transformations and allowing those transformations to reach greater depth and scope.
Despite the barbarism, there is a left that learns, creates, and confronts its own crisis of project. In recent years, the popular camp has organized the Dilemmas of Humanity conferences to reflect on questions capable of forming a unifying agenda; it created the International Peoples’ Assembly to promote encounters among struggles that were previously disconnected; it has fostered dialogue among publishers, sustained networks of communication media, and waged battles in defense of art and culture, spirituality, and subjectivity.
This accumulation is part of a field of forces and tensions. By debating them in factories, neighborhoods, churches, and social media, we can collectively find the best ways to address them. But I want to speak specifically about one of them: the distance from the people, the difficulty of sustaining dialogue with society as a whole, including the working class, at a moment when it is necessary to dispute the imagination and the hegemony of capital.
Faced with the difficulties of disputing space within the media ecosystem, popular movements must take on the challenge of dialoguing with society as a whole and expanding the reach of their message in order to dispute ideas, breaking through the wall of arguments imposed by capital to criminalize and paralyze them.
Communication is a political act with an important role in education and integration. It must be directed toward the entire working class, not only the organizations’ bases, but also this vast army of workers who raise their children amid crisis, go out to work every day, and interpret political projects according to the challenges of their realities. Although rarely directly addressed, this subject is not depoliticized, even if they do not engage in political militancy. They hear the news without having time to verify sources, they need to orient themselves to minimize risks, they must survive the hostility of their environment and will seek the quickest and safest exits. Yet this army also carries within it a sense of justice.
In times of crisis, interests can become detached from needs; therefore, the role of the popular movement has been, and must continue to be, to build consciousness, develop critical capacity for theoretical and political action, and do so from within the combative spirit that emerges from the struggle for survival. It is there that everyday alternatives are found — alternatives capable of becoming a conscious, organized, and critical force for transforming society.
Throughout history, people have always identified themselves with an ideal, a cause that motivates them and is a source of pride, that has meaning in itself regardless of the possibility of victory. To be radical in relation to the problems identified by the people does not simply mean visiting territories or speaking their language; it requires a project of justice and oh the future that aims to win, with real power.
The left distances itself from the people when it lacks a new proposal, when it no longer draws strength from its ideals, and when there is no reference figure capable of promoting unity in leadership through example and coherence. This is not merely an organizational issue, although operational decisions may be necessary; it is a crisis of project intimately linked to a crisis of the subject.
The meaning of being left-wing has become so ambiguous that it no longer functions as orientation for political camps. What we call the left — here understood through the experience of the popular movement — is constituted in the very process of struggle and in the self-understanding of that struggle. Often, it forms in the peripheries of those dispossessed of bread and culture. It is never a definitive subject, never fully formed; it is constituted through the uneven path of developing consciousness. That is why it needs the collective — its company, its trust, its inspiration, and its pressure. It is formed through everyday tasks, negotiations with institutions, the production of food with sovereignty, and mobilizations — those moments of sharpening contradictions that accelerate processes.
The distance between the left and the people becomes even more complex when popular mobilization weakens and retreats, which paradoxically occurs more frequently under progressive governments. Organized popular force alters the balance of forces that makes electoral victory possible, but that victory often fails to translate into greater strength for the popular camp.
The role of the popular movement is to struggle for the project, to form those who participate in it, to defend the horizon at every step, and to strengthen the social fabric that is the source of power, with the defense of sovereignty against imperialism as its reference point, the sovereignty of all peoples of the world.
Resistance against imperialism, anywhere in the world, is resistance in the name of the working class, in the name of oppressed peoples, in the name of a history of colonization shared by peoples who need to know each other better, to better tell the story of where they come from, and to refuse to let go of one another in the search for their horizons.
The left-wing subject must commit to understanding the world. To this end, the popular movement has resumed its educational processes in schools, exchange brigades, and productive processes, where the art of resistance occupies a central place and ways of life serve as sources of reflection. In this way, the popular movement participates in the dispute over common sense in order to awaken the ethical indignation that keeps alive the hope for the world we deserve to live in — a world of which we have already seen beautiful examples.
In the year marking Fidel’s centenary, a small boat leaves Mexico carrying Palestinian flags to tell the Cuban people that they are not alone; a poet asks for his rifle to defend the homeland; a group of children sings the song of the armed poet. A small boat and its flags, a poet, a song, a rifle, all speak of the strength of beauty and the value of dreams defended against every empire and its wars, against every siege and medieval witch hunt. Until victory!
Llanisca Lugo lives in Cuba and is part of the political coordination of ALBA Movements. This article was originally published in Revista América Latina en Movimiento no. 560.
