Abigarramiento y Hegemonía: Historia y política en el pensamiento andino

Abstract

The core of our research is, strictly speaking, the issue of hegemony in the Andean world. The approach we have chosen to address this theoretical-political problem is not based on the analysis of this category from a firmly philological point of view nor have we chosen to draw a frame of modulations, uses and potentialities of the notion of hegemony, but we have drawn a political contour — understood as equivalent to the different historical efforts to build hegemony relations — in two countries strongly marked by the Hispanic colonial heritage: Bolivia and Peru. Therefore, our research is not only focused on the history and politics in those nations, but it does so by deploying, as the backbone of the narration, a critical dialogue with the historical approaches and political proposals that emerge from the intellectual production of two of the most important Latin American Marxists of the twentieth century: the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui and the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado. The approach to the question of hegemony in the Andean world required questioning the effectiveness of the colonial heritage. Actually, to establish the framework of the hegemony issue, was required a prior genealogical explanation that would account for the motley condition [abigarramiento] on which any political project had to be based in the Andean region. Consequently, we could say that what René Zavaleta Mercado categorized as motley society [formación social abigarrada] and which in a schematic way we could characterize as the disarticulated coexistence of different modes of production, ideological patterns, domination structures and, in short, the simultaneity of temporalities out of sync in the same economic, political, and social scenario, decisively marked the various political projects in the region. Simultaneously, the motley condition —in the particular case that concerns us, the Andean world— could not be understood but as the result of the successive agreements and disagreements between uneven human groups: since the expansion of the Inca Empire, followed by the Conquest and the erection of the Viceroyalty of Peru, interceded by the expansion of commercial capitalism, the Latin American independence processes, the consolidation of the national oligarchies, the irruption of the capitalist mode of production in regional enclaves and so many other factors to which this research dedicates its pages. Ultimately, the motley condition does not refer exclusively to centrifugal tendencies, but also to those centripetal tendencies of attraction to the centers of power (economic, political, religious, etc.): the unresolved tensions between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies illustrate what is at stake with the notion of motley society. The crossroad is evident: if the motley condition indicates the tendency to the disarticulation of the different and, consequently, deepens the separation between the parties; hegemony, on the other hand, consists basically in the construction of a unity between the ruler and the ruled. Thus, as the 17 motley condition is constituted by the tension between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies that determine the normal functioning of power relations, between the separatist ratification of difference and the integrationist drive represented by identity, in the hegemony is also perceptible the tension that configures the metonymic link between the part and the whole, inseparable conflict of all political construction with hegemonic aspirations. These tensions between the notions of motley society and hegemony will appear again and again throughout our research and not only from a theoretical prism centered on the description of the elements that make up the semantic field of these categories, but also —and fundamentally— from the analysis of the historical ambiguities and the strategic instability of the political commitment of an Andean Marxism that finds in the works of Mariátegui and Zavaleta Mercado its most accomplished formulation.