The Twin Insurgency (Gilman) and Mexico's Fourth Transformation
Gilman’s
article came to my attention while I was reading Carlos Fazio’s discussion of
the plutocratic offensive in Mexico and elsewhere around the world. The plutocratic offensive is one part of
Gilman’s article. The other is the
expansion of international crime. Both of
these developments are closely associated with neoliberal globalization. The plutocratic offensive can be understood in
terms of David Harvey’s discussion of a ruling class offensive against the
constraints and regulatory burdens of Fordism in the context of the economic
slowdowns of the 1970s. What all of this
comprised was an assault on what Gilman refers to as social modernism, which
was built on the foundation of the generating patterns of growth that would
benefits broad sectors of the middle classes, including organized workers and
the professional middle classes. A key
to this pattern of development was the willingness of economic elites to underwrite
the well being of the middle classes, broadly construed. The ideological retreat from social modernism
proceeded in a multitude of different ways. The key result of all this was that the middle
classes lost the political agency with which they might have contested the
plutocratic offensive. In many
respects, they assented to it because the old Fordist or ISI (in the case of
Mexico) model of growth was broke. The
capitalist restructuring at the heart of the plutocratic offensive led to
massive economic dislocation and also a withdrawal of government from public
provision. At the same time, it opened up new flows of the goods and money as a
result of the deregulation of trade and finance. As Gilman writes, opening the economy was
meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy, and indeed it did” (2014, p. 11). Deviant entrepreneurs could now arbitrage moral
and regulatory standards between different jurisdictions. Small scale criminal organizations scaled up
operations, drawing into their orbit groups that were subject to economic and
political marginalization as a result of the plutocratic offensive.
Criminal
insurgencies want to carve out spaces in which to operate. There are a couple of dynamics at work
here. First there is competition between
these spaces, which, given the declining capacity of the state to enforce a
legal order, unfolds in terms of violent conflict. The tendency in Mexico has been the
corruption of security forces by criminal insurgencies and also the formation
of linkages between plutocratic and criminal insurgencies. The latter emerges,
for example, as a result of money laundering or by means of how capitalists use
cartels as informal security forces.
Sometimes, as in the cases of Peru and Colombia, the state creates legal
mechanisms for the development of privatized security forces that operate in
the service of extractive capitalists.
The pattern in Mexico seems to be focused on the development of informal
ad hoc groups in a manner that is reminiscent of Mdembe’s discussion of war
machines. Gilman says that criminal
insurgencies cripple the state. This can
be understood in geographically. There
are regions of the state where the rule of law depends more on criminal
insurgencies than the state itself. The
growing weakness of the state encourages further expansion of criminal
insurgencies. An interesting point that
Gilman raises here is the mistake of supposing that areas that are disconnected
from globalization are the world’s most insecure regions. In fact, failed states are deeply connected to
the global economy. At issue here are
the nature of these connections and how they transform political space. In this sense, we can think of criminal
insurgencies as both a cause and an effect of the hollowing out of the state
that was instigated by the plutocratic offensive. What emerges in these areas are lumpen states,
governed by coalitions of criminal insurgents and corrupted public authorities
of all kinds. This political
fragmentation corrodes the space of the nation state, considered as both a
legal order and as a mode of political community characteristic of modernity,
where people have emerged out of the broken shell of tradition in order to
participate in civil society as rational beings committed to the public good. This is the conception of democracy associated
with the advent of a progressive, enlightenment oriented modernity.
What
emerges instead is what sociologist Bryan Turner has referred to as an enclave
society. There are exlusive enclaves of
the rich and feral no go zones linked to criminal insurgencies and all manner
of hyrid zones. But the general pattern
is neither the criminal nor the plutocratic insurgency seeks to overturn the
state. They want, instead, to create their
own autonomous zones with the state or, more perniciously, to extort the state.
In both cases, suggests Gillman, they “freeride
on the institutional legacy of social modernism” (13). The sovereignty of the state is eclipsed by a
pathwork of micro-sovereignties, all of which acts to replace equality under
the law with blurred lines of authority between politics, private security, the
military, paramilitaries, and criminal organizations. Gilman:
“The proliferation of exceptional and unique micro-sovereignties
increases the scope for insurgents to engage in jurisdictional arbitrage and generates
demands by other insurgence from their own sovereign exceptions” (14). As micro-sovereignties proliferate, services
that were once considered to be public goods – the most important of which is
security – becoming subject to privatization. The disappearance of public goods also has the
effect of devaluing citizenship. What
should one have any allegiance to the nation state when it is unable to provide
essential services? It is better to cast
one’s loyalty with the local drug lord or with the huachicols. Or with the local militia. The result of this is the displacement of
national belonging, based on the idea of territorial kinship (see Steven Grosby)
in favor of neo-tribalism.
A very
clear illustration of this in the case of Mexico is AMLO’s policy response to
huachicol – the practice of stealing natural resources. AMLO creates assistance programs for the
municipalities that border the oil and gas pipelines of central Mexico, with
the expectation that communities members will the dissolve their linkages to
the huachicol, inform of the criminal groups and participate in the restoration
of the state’s authority over its resources and territory. The same logic also applies to AMLO’s policy
of amnesty for individuals that have been involved in organized crime – as
poppy cultivators, for instance. Amnesty
is oriented toward bringing them back into the national fold. So too is the provision of scholarships, so
that young people will opt to study rather than engage in some form of
organized crime. In general terms, I think
the Grosby’s notion of the nation as a form of territorial kinship can be tied
to the rhetoric of the Fourth Transformation.
4t is about the history of a people; its historical struggle to realize
itself through struggles against different forms of foreign domination – the Spanish
Crown, the conservatives, the Porifian elite and the PRIAN. 4t is of interest because it is a political
movement that aspires, at least in terms of its rhetoric, to reverse the
effects of Gilmans’ twin insurgencies. What
I would like to do with the Global Studies Association paper is to assess the
capacity of the AMLO the the 4t to modify the trajectory of neoliberalism,
which can be understood in terms of the unfolding logic of the twin
insurgency. The overall tendency is to
destroy not only the middle classes, but also the political community of the
nation state. The destruction works, in
part, by hollowing out any confidence that people might have in the capacity of
nation state to serve their basic interest.
Gilman’s broad middle classes are left with the choice of either
enduring a progressive loss of security and a defacto social degradation or –
if they can – joining one of the two insurgencies that disintegrating the
nation state. But this is a hard leap to
make given the disposition of the middle classes to play by the rules and to
organize their lives on the premise of economic and political stability.
Comments
Post a Comment