Il n’y aura d’authentique désaliénation que dans la mesure où les choses, au sens le plus matérialiste, auront repris leur place.
Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952.
Todas las tesis sobre el problema indígena que ignoran o eluden a éste como problema económico-social son otros tantos estériles ejercicios teoréticos—y a veces sólo verbales—, condenados a un absoluto descrédito. No las salva a algunas su buena fe. Prácticamente, todas no han servido sino para ocultar o desfigurar la realidad del problema. […] La cuestión indígena arranca de nuestra economía. Tiene sus raíces en el régimen de propiedad de la tierra. Cualquier intento de resolverla con medidas de administración o policía, con métodos de enseñanza o con obras de vialidad, constituye un trabajo superficial o adjetivo, mientras subsista la feudalidad de los gamonales.
José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1928.
Si esta cárcel sigue así.
todo preso es político.
‘Todo preso es político’, Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, 1987.
Abstract
In this paper we engage with and contribute to the critical project of highlighting the dilemmas that arise from structurally unequal and unjust social, political, and institutional realities when dealing with past wrongs or, better phrased, historic injustices. We emphasise the present-time character of historic injustices. We think that there is a risk of allochronism in discussing historic injustices mainly as wrongs done in the past. This risk consists in making people forget that redressing these injustices is something to be done in an unjust present structured by domination, and that those very past wrongs and harms helped to shape the present-time condition of structural injustice. As the misplacing in the past phenomena that occur in the present and in one’s practical context, allochronism has the effect that people do not feel responsible for those present-time injustices that derive from wrongs done in the past. Our aim is to propose one way of dealing with this risk of misallocating responsibility (and thus accountability), which consists in intersecting the notion of historic injustices with the notion of coloniality. After showing how an approach oriented by the notion of coloniality helps surmount the negative effects of allochronism and provides a significant complement to a structural approach to injustice (Sect. ‘Coloniality and Responsibility for Justice’), we turn to Frantz Fanon (Sect. ‘Fanon’) and José Carlos Mariátegui (Sect. ‘Mariátegui’) to illustrate the relationship between coloniality and justice and how it is possible to render a construal of ‘past wrongs’ without losing sight of their pervasiveness in the present time.
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Notes
The notion of coloniality was coined by Peruvian critical Marxist Aníbal Quijano (1930–2018) in the early 1990s and has been developed since then in a series of works by different Latin American authors. Arguably, it has its conceptual roots in the anti-imperialist Marxists and dependentist theorists from Latin America and other non-European contexts. The notion of coloniality and the critical tools it offers are, thus, earlier than Iris Marion Young’s own development of her social-connection model of responsibility and of her rendering of injustice as structural. Coloniality is a category with a sustained development since its first formulations. It is impossible to give an account of this development in a short note, but as a guide for reading and discussing the scope of the category, you can visit the following texts and authors: for the concept of coloniality of power, Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2001); for the coloniality of knowledge, Edgardo Lander (2000); for coloniality of being, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007); for coloniality of time, see Walter Mignolo (2012), De Oto and Quintana (2010); for gender coloniality, see María Lugones (2008, 2016). A more recent contribution to the discussion on the scope, problems and perspectives of the decolonial inflection, as the authors call it, is that of Eduardo Restrepo and Axel Rojas (2010).
In our discursive context, ‘reconciliation’ (reconciliación) has its own history, which associates the term with a politics of leniency towards the perpetrators of crimes against humanity during the last dictatorship. Here we use it in this sense, somehow against Lu 2017’s defence of it.
According to Argentine linguist Bonnin, ‘national reconciliation’ was the ‘main leitmotiv of the Argentinian Catholic Episcopate since the publication of the document “Church and national community” in 1981’ (2015, pp. 226–227). The Argentinian Catholic religious authorities established a ‘semantically empty lexical repertoire that allowed different actors to fill it with those senses that were more suited for their own strategies, representations and convictions about what truth, justice and, forgiveness are’ (p. 227). He continues: ‘Obeying the structural semantic ambiguity of the religious discourse […], the episcopal documents defined an apparent agreement on this word, and the different actors from the catholic, political, and human rights sectors were the ones who ascribed a meaning to it […]. Thus, having originated as a theological term, reconciliation was reworked as a political-religious concept that would wind up being integrated to the political, legislative, judicial, and human rights discourses’ (pp. 228–229). Right-wing, pro-dictatorship political actors would later and until today use the idea of reconciliation to defend officials and perpetrators facing trials and prison for their crimes against humanity. Early in the beginning of the post-dictatorship era, Madres de Plaza de Mayo and H.I.J.O.S. adopted the motto ‘ni olvido, ni perdón’, to which ‘ni reconciliación’ was then added (‘no to forget, no to forgiveness, no to reconciliation’; also ‘no olvidamos, no perdonamos, no nos reconciliamos’; ‘we don’t forgive, we don’t forget, we don’t reconcile’).
In recent years, there has been a revival of the conservative use of ‘reconciliation’ that illustrates the case against the term. During the liberal presidency of Maurio Macri (2015–2019), the members of the Supreme Court Elena Highton, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Horacio Rosatti voted to apply the ‘2 for 1’ reduction of prison sentences to criminals against humanity who operated during the last dictatorship (judges Ricardo Lorenzetti and Juan Carlos Maqueda voted against this). During this time, some officials publicly denied the number of the 30,000 disappeared ones and promoted a ‘reconciliation’ discourse, which the Church authorities also preached more publicly. All this prompted popular demonstrations, thanks to which the Supreme Court’s decision was finally overturned. In this context, several actors from human rights activism, including H.I.J.O.S. and Madres de Plaza de Mayo, publicly stressed the connection between ‘reconciliation’ and downright impunity for the crimes against humanity.
See their websites: https://www.abuelas.org.ar/; https://madres.org/; https://madresfundadoras.blogspot.com/. For a good Anglophone work on the human rights movement in post-dictatorship Argentina, see van Drunen 2010.
‘30,000 detained-disappeared comrades, present, now and always’.
As we write this, there is an alarming rise of political actors who straightforwardly portrait the last dictatorship as something good, propose to pardon imprisoned members of the Army who committed crimes against humanity, and refer to the different policies designed to address historic injustices as a ‘human rights scam’. A concise description of the whole process of memory, truth, and justice in Argentina since the return of democracy can be found in Iud 2023.
For example: ‘Never before was the average citizen of England, France, and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches. Whence comes this new wealth and on what does its accumulation depends? It comes primarily from the darker nations of the world—Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the West Indies and the islands of the South Seas. […] Chinese, East Indians, Negroes, and South American Indians are by common consent for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them. To the furtherance of this highly profitable economic dictum has been brought every available resource of science and religion. Thus arises the astonishing doctrine of the natural inferiority of most men to the few, and the interpretation of “Christian brotherhood” as meaning anything that one of the “brothers” may at any time want it to mean’ (p. 57); ‘Africa is the Land of the Twentieth Century […]. There are not only the well-known and traditional products, but boundless chances in a hundred different directions, and above all, there is a throng of human beings who, could they once be reduced to the docility and steadiness of Chinese coolies or of 17th and 18th century European laborers, would furnish to their masters a spoil exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of Imperialists. This, then, is the real secret of that desperate struggle for Africa which began in 1877 and is now culminating’ (p. 58).
For a critique of liberal theories of recognition in relation to restorative policies in Canada, see Coulthard, Glen, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’ (2007) and his already cited book.
The guards violently repressed the inmates with absolutely no reason and with complete disregard for their lives. This is why their behaviour was finally labelled as a crime against humanity.
This critical political-practical principle (‘todo preso es politico’) is in widespread use by prison abolitionists and anti-punitive movements and organisations. Punishment abolitionist movements advocate not only the abolition of prison but the overall transformation of the punitive culture that is an essential component of the modern state and are politically and judicially active against police brutality and class and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. In Argentina, the movement is paradigmatically represented by the organisation Coordination Against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI, following the Spanish initials; see their website: http://www.correpi.org/).
Let us remember here Young’s conceptualisation of structural injustice: ‘Structural injustice, then, exists when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them. Structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong distinct from the wrongful action of an individual agent or the repressive policies of a state. Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms’ (Young 2011, p. 52).
For a study on the differences between the social connection model and the liability model of justice/injustice, see Jerade and Marey 2022.
Not all revolutionary processes of independence are like the Haitian Revolution in this sense, and this is precisely the exceptional character of this revolution.
A concise and useful picture of the importance of Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist can be found in Khalfa 2018. Particularly, his work was indispensable to rebut ‘scientific’ racism. See Khalfa 2018 p. 192: ‘Fanon’s later psychiatric works, particularly those on mental illness in North Africa, confirm theoretically what this experience had revealed and directly criticize the fundamentally flawed undertaking of pre-war colonial psychiatry, which naturalized mental disorders that were in fact determined by social and cultural factors. […] Scientific reductionism flourished in the colonies, in particular under the authority of Antoine Porot (1876–1965) and his influential “Algiers school”, only because it provided racism with a semblance of scientific foundation’.
The texts: ‘Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord’ by Fanon and Lacaton was publised in the Comptes rendus du Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française, (53rd Session, Nice, 5–11 September 1955), Paris: Masson, 1955, pp. 657–660. Here we use the 2018 English version ‘Conducts of confession in North Africa (1)’ edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young and translated by Steven Corcoran. This edition also includes the notes for the paper, edited as ‘Conducts of confession in North Africa (2)’. This latter source is edited as authored only by Fanon but it was, according to the editor Khlafa, a work of both him and Lacaton.
Fanon 2018, p. 416: ‘Eight times out of ten, the accused absolutely denies any wrongdoing. In the extreme case, he will not explain his detention. On each occasion, however, he has admitted his guilt during the course of the investigation. Then from a certain moment, in principle after three months in detention, he goes back on his declarations. He does not try to prove his innocence. He claims his innocence. If the court decides it, then let it kill him. He accepts everything, “Allah is great”. […] Sometimes, however, the charges contained in the case file are, according to the expression, extremely hefty. The accused has reconstructed the crime. He has revealed the weapon’s hiding place. Witnesses claim to have seen him strike’.
Known as the ‘Amauta’ (master and wise man in Quechua), Mariátegui is considered the founding father of Latin American Marxism, and even ‘the first Marxist of America’, as Melis 1967 called him. As I (Marey) briefly comment in Marey 2023, Mariátegui’s influential corpus is compounded of several articles in the press (including his own socialist cultural and political journal, Amauta, 1926–1930, which can be bound here: https://www.mariategui.org/revista-amauta/numeros-de-la-revista/), political speeches, letters, essays, and books, and covers a wide range of social, political, economic, historical, and literary topics relating to Peruvian as well as world problems. Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality is rightly thought of as the cornerstone of Latin American Marxism, and it is also an important contribution to socialist theory and Marxism in general because of its cosmopolitan scope (Bergel 2017, 2021) and its critique of transnational and extractive capitalism, imperialism, and bourgeois republicanism. A second feature of Mariátegui’s work is that it is not an adaptation of European Marxian themes to the Peruvian national context, but an original contribution to socialist theory and political movements of its own right. In his detailed analysis of the influences, sources, and precise ideological definition of Mariátgui’s Marxist thought and praxis, José Aricó held that Mariátegui’s ‘unprecedented validity’ lies in that he ‘rebuilt’ all his intellectual influences (besides Marx and Engels, mainly Sorel, Gramsci, Lenin, Labriola, and Croce) into an ‘all-encompassing vision of the Modern capitalist society’, a ‘wider and more global [than the orthodox Marxist] vision of the world’, which combined a materialist social-economic analysis with a cultural one (Aricó 1978, p. XVII). A third salient characteristic of Mariátegui’s work is that he turned to the Inca Empire’s communal-communist conception of economy and society not with a nostalgic, anti-modern spirit but to show how it is possible to conceive of a different human relation to the land, a relation not reducible to the private individual appropriation of the land, and that is both more egalitarian and advanced than the Peruvian colonial and bourgeois economy. Understood as a strong and rich economy and society, the Incan community can be constructed as a feasible alternative to capitalism, and functions as a plausible utopia. (For the non-Spanish reader unfamiliar with Mariátegui, the site and archive Marxists.org has an acceptable collection of English translations of some of his work.)
‘Indian’ is the word Mariátegui uses. We translate ‘Indian’ for ‘indio’.
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Marey, M., De Oto, A. Historic Injustices as Matters of the Present. Res Publica (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-024-09657-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-024-09657-z