By Boaventura de Sousa Santos*
Consult any modern
written language dictionary and you will come away with the conclusion that the
vernacular and the utopian are opposing concepts. While the vernacular (from
the Latin word vernaculus) means that which is specific to a given country,
place or region, the utopian (from Utopia, the title of Thomas More’s famous
1516 book) refers to that which
would be expected to characterize an imaginary government nowhere specific.
Figuratively speaking, the vernacular is that which is right, pure, or of the
land, whereas the utopian describes that which is make-believe, fanciful,
chimerical. In the present text I seek to show that, contrary to this apparent
contradiction and the consensus of dictionaries, the two terms share more
complicities than one might imagine, and that those complicities have become
more visible in recent times.
My title draws from
the groundbreaking work of Teodor Shanin, one of the most remarkable and
forgotten Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, which was instrumental in
reclaiming the rich, diverse and dynamic character of Karl Marx’s thought
(against all orthodoxies, both Marxist and non-Marxist). Shanin focused
especially on showing the importance of Marx’s unpublished writings from the
1867 publication of the first volume of Das Kapital (the last major work
to be published in his lifetime) until his death in 1883 – i.e., the notes of
the “later Marx”, totaling no less than 30,000 pages. Until the publication of
Capital, and notwithstanding his being more widely read on the history of
non-European – namely Asian – societies than
any other European theorist of his time, Marx analyzed those societies from a
Eurocentric and evolutionist point of view, based on the notion that such
societies represented earlier, irrevocably obsolete stages of Europe’s
developed capitalist societies. But even with regard to the latter societies,
the only one to be analyzed by Marx with an impressive degree of detail and
insight was England, then the most developed of capitalist economies.
A keen observer of the
revolutionary movements then mushrooming right on European soil but which did
not follow the proletarian revolution model he had theorized about, Marx began
to pay closer attention to them, rather than ignoring them or forcibly squaring
them with his theory. That was the case with the 1871 Paris Commune, but even
more so with Russia’s
peasant-based revolutionary populist movement, which made itself strongly felt
in the 1870s and 1880s. In order to understand the events in Russia, Marx
obsessively undertook to learn Russian (as if it were “a matter of life or
death”, his wife complained in a letter to Engels, Marx’s faithful companion
and longtime collaborator). From then on and until the end of his life, the
heterogeneity of histories and social transformations became central to Marx’s
reflections. The theoretical consequences soon followed: there are no rigid
laws of social development; there is not one, but several ways to reach socialism,
and the analyses contained in Capital are only entirely valid in the case of
England; far from being a hindrance or historical residue, peasants can, in
certain circumstances, be a revolutionary subject. All this seemed odd,
theoretically impure and “not very Marxist” in the eyes of the majority of late
19th-century Marxists. This development in Marx’s thinking was even regarded as
the sign of an aging mind, and in fact one of the four versions of his letter
to Vera Zasulich, a Russian populist, was censored by the Russian Marxists and
remained unpublished until… 1924.
Curiously enough, the same accusations of theoretical impurity were to be directed against Lenin by his comrades after 1905-7.
What, then, were
Marx’s sins? There were two. On the one hand, his valuing local and vernacular
contexts and experiences, despite their deviating from the supposedly universal
patterns. On the other hand, his viewing as positive and even utopian that
which was old, seemingly residual (Russia’s peasant commune, based on community
property and grassroots
democracy, albeit under the constant surveillance of the despotic tsarist
state) and which, by reason of its voluntarism and moralism, posed a challenge
to the objective (and amoral) laws of social evolution he himself had unveiled.
All this sounds like ancient history and not relevant to our present and
future, but that is really not the case. This kind of debate, centered on the
need to look to tradition in search of energies and clues for better futures
and, more generally, on how difficult it is for pure theory, whatever it may
be, to account for ever-recalcitrant, ever-changing reality, was present
throughout the twentieth century and will accompany us, I think, in the current
century.
Let me mention, by way of illustration, two very different contexts that were (and probably still are) marked by this debate. I will not go into the fact that not one of the revolutionary processes stabilized in the course of the last century was led by the working class in the precise way envisaged by Marxist theory, be they the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Mexican revolution of 1910, the Chinese revolutions of 1910, 1927-37 and 1949, the Vietnamese revolution of 1945 or the Cuban revolution of 1959. In each and every one of these, the protagonists were the oppressed working people from both the countryside and the city, with peasants playing a decisive role in some of them.
The first context was
that of decolonization in the Asian subcontinent (notably India) and in Africa.
Every independence process was marked by the following dilemma: given that
local realities strayed so far from the European cases analyzed by Marx that
many adaptations would be required to even start to envisage Marxist versions of
socialist-oriented nationalist
revolutions, should that fact be regarded as an added difficulty or an
opportunity? In India there was a lively debate among the nationalist forces,
with, on the one hand, Nehru’s position, linking socialism to the modernization
in India, along lines that did not differ much from European modernization, and
on the other, Gandhi, who saw in India’s rich culture and
community practices the best guarantee of true liberation. In 1947, Nehru’s
position prevailed, but the Gandhian tradition has lived on and remains
operative to this day. In Africa, the time span runs from 1957 (the
independence of Ghana) to 1975 (independence of the Portuguese colonies).
At the risk of omission, let me say that the four most notable leaders in the anti-colonial liberation struggle were Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Leopold Senghor (Senegal) and Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau). They were all intensely involved in the debate about the value of the African vernacular, and they all tried, albeit in different ways, to counteract Marx’s Eurocentrism and to envisage futures for their countries in which African culture, traditions and ways of life would be adequately valued. Each in his own way, they all contributed to a notion of African socialism that called for a diversity of paths toward development where African humanism was to replace unilinear progress at all costs and the class struggle would take a back seat to ancestral experiences of communal life.
They all included the possibility that the local, ancestral vernacular might become the mobilizing idea of a liberation utopia. Just like in the later Marx, with whom none of them was familiar, the vernacular would obviously have to be adapted for its utopian potential to be released.
By 1975, when the then
Portuguese colonies gained independence, the terms of the debate had changed
significantly, thanks to the external context and to the knowledge resulting
from the evolution of the previous experiences of independence on the continent.
But even then, the tension between the vernacular and the utopian manifested
itself in multiple ways.
Just to give one example: At first, Mozambique’s Frelimo party was hostile
toward everything traditional, viewing it as a past that had been hopelessly adulterated
by the colonial violence. Hence its hostility toward the continuity of the
traditional authorities in the role of administering justice in informal ways,
carried out by members of the local community and based on African justice
systems. However, dismantling the system of community authorities
proved so disruptive to the ways of peaceful coexistence within the communities
– already beyond the reach of official justice anyway –, that the government
had to reverse course and in 2000 ended up legitimizing those authorities,
which now operate in parallel with the community courts. In similar fashion, in
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the tabanca (i.e., village) courts
continued to exist, under the name of area courts (tribunais de zona).
The second context is
quite different and a lot more recent. It occurred in Mexico with the 1994
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, and in Bolivia and Ecuador with the
constitutional rocesses that followed the victories by Evo Morales (2006) and
Rafael Correa (2007), respectively, in the presidential elections of these two
countries. The Zapatista experiment constitutes a most
complex mixture of the vernacular and the utopian, combining to this day the
ideals of social and political liberation on the one hand and, on the other,
the valuing of the community culture and experiences of the indigenous peoples
of southern Mexico. A counter-hegemonic reading of the ideals of human rights
is thus interwoven with a radical demand for self-government and for constant
innovation based on that which is genuine and ancestral. As
regards the two democratic experiments in Bolivia and Ecuador, they came after
decades of mobilization of the indigenous peoples, as a result of which the
latter’s ancestral worldviews made a decisive imprint on the Constitutions of
Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009). The notion of development has been replaced
by that of good living and the concept of nature as a natural resource has been
replaced by the concept of nature as pachamama, mother earth, who must
be cared for and whose rights are explicitly enshrined in Article 71 of the
Ecuadorian Constitution. The interweaving of the vernacular and the utopian,
the past and the future, was
enthusiastically embraced by the urban ecological movements of many countries,
which knew nothing about indigenous philosophy but still were attracted by its
respect for the values of the care for nature and the ecological awareness that
drove them. As with the Zapatistas before, the new and innovative emphasis on
the vernacular and the local gave rise to discourses that transcended the local
and became part of cosmopolitan emancipatory
narratives of an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-patriarchal bent.
This creative tension between the vernacular and the utopian did not end with
the historical experiments mentioned above. I would venture to say that it will
accompany us in the present century, no doubt strengthened by the alternatives
brought about by the post-pandemic period. It is becoming increasingly evident
that unless societies and economies adopt ways of life
not based on the unjust and unfettered exploitation of natural and human
resources, human life on the planet is at risk of becoming extinct.
———————
*Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a Portuguese m professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coímbra (Portugal), distinguished legal scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, and global legal scholar at the University of Warwick. Co-founder and one of the main leaders of the World Social Forum. Article provided to Other News by the author,on Sept.07, 2020
