Religion Without Redemption: Social Contradictions and Awakened Dreams in Latin America

By Luis Martínez Andrade

Latin America has been a place of radical political inspiration providing an alternative to the neoliberal model. Religion without Redemption looks at the sociology of religion, political philosophy and the history of ideas of the continent, in an attempt to show how Western understanding fails to come close to a correct analysis of how and why political and economic characteristics work as they do.

It focuses on how the centrality of religion for the people of Latin America has influenced how they interact with the changes in the modern economic system. Capitalism has taken on religious characteristics: it has sacred places of worship, such as the shopping mall, as well as its own prophets. This book explains how this form of ‘cultural religion’ accompanies many aspects of life in a contradictory manner: not only does it fulfil the role of legitimating oppression, it also can be a powerful source of rebellion, unveiling thus a subversive side to the status quo.

Religion Without Redemption advances the ideas of liberation theory into the 21st century, and challenges the provincialism to which many Latin American thinkers are usually consigned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783712946

Luis Martínez Andrade

Luis Martinez Andrade is a Mexican essayist, with a PhD in sociology from EHESS in Paris. In 2009 he received the internationally acclaimed Thinking Against the Mainstream essay award in Havana. He is the author of Religion Without Redemption (Pluto, 2015).

Book preview

Religion without Redemption

Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons

Series editors:

Ramón Grosfoguel (University of California at Berkeley)

Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University)

S. Sayyid (University of Leeds)

Since the end of the Cold War, unresolved conjunctures and crises of race, ethnicity, religion, diversity, diaspora, globalisation, the West and the non-West, have radically projected the meaning of the political and the cultural beyond the traditional verities of left and right. Throughout this period, Western developments in ‘international relations’ have become increasingly defined as corollaries to national ‘race relations’ across both the European Union and the United States, where the re-formation of Western imperial discourses and practices has been given particular impetus by the ‘war against terror’. At the same time, hegemonic Western continuities of racial profiling and colonial innovations have attested to the incomplete and interrupted institution of the postcolonial era. Today we are witnessing renewed critiques of these postcolonial horizons at the threshold of attempts to inaugurate the political and cultural forms that decolonisation now needs to take within and between the West and the ‘non-West’. This series explores and discusses radical ideas that open up and advance understandings of these politically multicultural issues and theoretically interdisciplinary questions.

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Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen

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Amr G.E. Sabet

The Politics of Islamophobia

Race, Power and Fantasy

David Tyrer

Religion without

Redemption

Social Contradictions and

Awakened Dreams in Latin America

Luis Martínez Andrade

Translated by Antonio Carmona Báez

Foreword by Michael Löwy

First published in Spanish as Religión sin redención. Contradicciones sociales y sueños despiertos en América Latina, © Taberna Libraria Editores, second edition, 2012.

First English-language edition published 2015 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

La presente publicación fue realizada con el estímulo del Programa de Apoyo a la Traducción (PROTRAD), dependiente de las instituciones culturales de México convocantes.

This publication was made possible with the help of the Translation Support Programme (PROTRAD), which has been established by a number of Mexican cultural institutions.

Copyright © Luis Martínez Andrade 2015

The right of Luis Martínez Andrade to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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In memory of Frantz Fanon

Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture.

Walter Benjamin

Contents

Foreword

Luis Martínez Andrade is a brilliant young Mexican scholar, whose writings, published in Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, English and French, are beginning to attract world-wide attention. His essay on shopping malls, included in this book, received first prize for the 2009 international competition Thinking Against the Current, organised by the Cuban Book Institute. This volume is a collection of essays, on very different topics; however, in spite of the diversity, it holds remarkable unity and coherence, given by his theoretical/political approach: a critical Marxist viewpoint, from an emancipatory – that is, anti-capitalist – Latin American perspective. The multiplicity of his intellectual sources in radical theory, both European and Latin American, is impressive: Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, world-system analysis (Immanuel Wallerstein), philosophy of liberation (Enrique Dussel), decoloniality (Anibal Quijano), liberation theology (Leonardo Boff), and other renowned writers such as Walter Mignolo, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Žižek.

Martínez Andrade uses this rich body of cultural tools in order to develop his own thinking. This applies also to the numerous references to my writings: they only appear if useful to the assertion of his own arguments. His writings are not idle academic exercises, but inspired, as he tells us in his prologue, by rage – the ‘noble rage’ (digna rabia) proudly asserted by the Mexican Zapatistas – and hope: rage against the injustice of the system, and hope in a radical alternative.

One of the most original aspects of the book is the combination of the classical Marxist analysis of imperialism with the arguments of decolonial thinking. Thanks to his roots in Mexican indigenous culture and collective memory, Martínez Andrade clearly understands the real meaning of the so-called ‘Discovery of the Americas’: a violent and brutal enterprise of colonial conquest, which until today shapes the behaviour of the ruling oligarchy in the continent. The system of domination in Latin America is still based on the coloniality of power (Anibal Quijano), that is, the racist segregation and ruthless exploitation, both by the imperialist/colonial powers and the local ruling classes, of the Indigenous, Black and mestizo masses that constitute the majority of the population. Moreover, the processes of knowledge and the social sciences are deeply shaped by epistemological paradigms which produce and reproduce dependency and colonial domination.

Max Weber, in his celebrated lecture on ‘Science as vocation’ (2004 [1919]) spoke of the conflict between irreducibly antagonistic systems of values as a ‘War of Gods’ (Kampf der Götter). A similar sort of conflict is the red thread running through the essays of Martínez Andrade’s book: the war between the God of Commodity, the new Golden Calf, and the God of the Poor, celebrated by liberation theology.

As Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, as well as the Latin American theologists, had grasped, capitalism functions as a sort of religion. Its idols – the Market, Money, Capital, the Foreign Debt and Competition – are ruthless, and require human sacrifices: the lives of the poor. Shopping malls are temples for the Commodity-cult and the fanatical adoration of the Holy Brands.

The opposite side in this War of Gods is religion as Spirit of Utopia, or as the Principle of Hope (Ernst Bloch), which has its roots in the biblical prophets and the first Christian communities, and took a new subversive form during the sixteenth-century Peasant War (Friedrich Engels) under the leadership of the revolutionary theologian Thomas Müntzer. Latin American liberation theology – represented by Leonardo Boff, Frei Betto, Rubén Dri, Jung Mo Sung, Hugo Assmann and many others – is the inheritor of this radical tradition; its intransigent opposition to the capitalist religion, particularly in its deadliest form, neoliberalism, and its unconditional commitment to the self-emancipation of the poor contributed powerfully to the upsurge of social movements and revolutionary struggles, and changed the history of Latin America.

Through its unique synthesis of theology and revolution, heterodox Marxism and leftist postcolonialism, anti-capitalist social science and anti-colonial epistemology, philosophy and (critique of) political economy, ecology and socialism, Martínez Andrade’s collection of essays is a fascinating contribution to the renewal of Critical Theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century. His radical Latin American perspective is certainly one of the reasons for the originality and forcefulness of his insights.

Michael Löwy

Paris, 5 August 2014

Prologue

The essays that the reader now holds in her/his hands have been written at different latitudes but all hold the same origin. On the one hand, they were born out of rage and, on the other, out of hope. Rage due to the dire situation with which most of humanity is confronted and the terrible level of exploitation that brings both human life and the entire planet to the edge of destruction. This should not be interpreted as some naïve irritation, commonly found among those ‘warm souls’ who, when watching children die of hunger, cry for the suffering of the most vulnerable. No. Our abhorrence stems from something else. It is a hate with class. It is a noble rage.

It is through the emancipatory social movements – as another expression of class – that we find the possibility of rupture with history’s continuum. The hope for that-which-is-not-yet obliges us to move, and gives meaning to the struggles of liberation and the questions facing the non-truths of discourses.

Strange as it may seem, the brief essays compiled in this book are products of long journeys, many debates and various learning experiences. This does not mean that they are complete. To the contrary. They are suggestions and tracks that I would like to share with the purpose of advancing on the path of hope, as ‘we walk while asking and listening’. Some parts have already been presented in colloquiums, others published in academic journals. Nevertheless, the articles have been modified and re-elaborated in order to attain better comprehension.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Entelechies and Cathedrals’, serves as a critical interpretation of the relation between modern hegemony and the dynamic of capital. Hence, in this section we are moved to look critically at appearances because, if we want to contribute to the emancipation of humanity, we must then question fetishised truths. In this sense, a critique of and reference to the hegemonic form – that is, the capitalist system as a specific social relation and its diverse expressions – is essential. The religious character of capitalism will be demonstrated so that, in this way, we can find its specific manifestations in Latin America.

The second half, ‘Utopia and Liberation’ responds to our interest in understanding the important proposals coming out of our continent. The subversive core of the utopic function – expressed through liberation theology, should be reflected upon as a revolutionary project. That project has gone under many different names: trans-modernity, bio-civilisation and eco-socialism, among others. Nevertheless, the labels do not produce irreconcilable disagreements, given that for all these projects the priority lies in the liberation of humanity and of Earth. Without doubt, the contributions of Critical Theory and the philosophy of liberation play an important role in the development of these reflections, as they allow us to recognise the constant movement and immanent contradictions of reality and the geopolitics of the loci of enunciations, the emancipatory nucleus of liberating ratio and the ethnic-racial mechanisms of domination and exploitation.

Here, I would like to acknowledge my admiration for the social movements and people who have inspired many of the questions I raise here. To them, I am eternally indebted. I am especially thankful for that insubordinate Marxist, Michael Löwy, a true expression of the organic intellectual from whom I have learned much throughout these years.

Special thanks to Fernando Matamoros, David Cabajal López, Juan Carlos Martínez Andrade, Alí Calderon and especially to Marianna Musial, who have been accomplices in this intellectual enterprise. To this end, I am grateful for the work done by Antonio Carmona Báez on this English-language translation. I would also like to thank the team at Praktyka Teoretyczna journal in Poland and their editor Krystian Szadkowski. Finally, thanks to Sophie Richmond for her rigorous and elegant help with corrections. For all the errors and weaknesses found in this book, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Part One

Entelechies and Cathedrals

1

Civilising Paradigms and Colonial Atavisms: Power and Social Sciences

The sixteenth century shaped not only the identity of what would later become Latin America but also laid the basis for the emergence of the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein, 1999), the emergence of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) and the advent of modernity (Dussel, 1994). These events profoundly influenced the endogenous and exogenous dynamics of different societies and human groups. In the late fifteenth century, and at the dawn of the sixteenth century, such transcendental phenomena were generated in everyday life around the world (Lebenswelt). The year 1492 represents a foundational moment in the collective imaginary of modern Western subjectivity, as it involved not only the concealment of the Other but also the pragmatic and specific denial of what is considered to be different (Dussel, 1994). Capitalism, modernity and coloniality arise simultaneously. The analysis – diachronic or synchronic – of the socio-historical form¹ of one of these phenomena should not unravel the study of the civilisation triad. Coloniality, modernity and capitalism are intertwined phenomena that have shaped different relations of domination; various control mechanisms and multiple patterns of exploitation in favour of elite interests.

Throughout Latin American history, the phenomenon of colonialism has shown similar characteristics (domination, racism, humiliation, imposition and violence) with different paradigmatic nuances (Hispanisation, Eurocentrism, the American Way of Life). In this sense, we could say that colonialism is a geopolitically determined socio-historical form. The process of coloniality disrupts all levels of social reality, that is, its teleological dynamics can be seen in the field of culture, epistemology, politics, religion, education, etc.² Therefore, the phenomenon of colonialism is embedded in various projects undertaken by the hegemonic dominant classes. The commodification of social life and the fetishisation of power need to be studied from a critical, negative outlook, since reality must be conceived as perpetual motion, constant disruptions and continuous explosions. Understanding (Verstehen) and explaining (Erklären)³ society implies recognising its conflicting and contradictory nature.

From the epistemic colonial difference⁴ – which is where we stand – we will analyse critically the horizons of civilising paradigms in Latin America. It is necessary to insist, however, first, that this work focuses on the process of neo-colonialism in Latin America. In this sense, we will not develop a historiographical argument but a socio-historical deconstruction of the colonial/modern/capitalist form. Second, it is evident that social relations are not homogeneous, much less static. We can, however, identify some common features (domination, resistance, struggle, conflict, etc.) that characterise Latin American societies⁵ as colonised societies. Finally, we argue that it is not reality that must conform to the theories, concepts or categories. On the contrary, the analytical tools used to perform critical analysis of the specific social form need to be appropriate.

Ego Conquiro and Modern Subjectivity

The year 1492 is significant in the formation of modern Western subjectivity since it marks the founding moment for what would evolve into its concrete symbolic conscience. On 6 January of that year, Boabdil (Muhammad XII) surrendered in Granada. On 15 February, Torquemada announced his project to commence the expulsion of the Jews from the peninsula. On 17 April, there was the signing of the Santa Fe Accords and on 31 July, the Jews began to leave Castile and Aragon by decree. On 12 October of that same year, there was an ‘encounter’ between two worlds that had previously been disconnected commercially and ideologically. It was against this backdrop, and from the socio-political and cultural upheaval of the Iberian world, that there arose myths of an inquisatorial, prophetic and apocalyptic modernity.

The ‘discovery’ of America is a myth constructed by a European narrative. The legend of the three ships,⁶ which sailed from the Canary Islands on 8 September 1492 led by one Genovese man, serves as an ideological substratum of a Western historiographical narrative. To affirm that Europeans were the first to reach the ‘New World’ only helps to consolidate what has been termed ‘one unique view of history’ (Benjamin, 1969). By this, with Walter Benjamin (2001), we are referring to an idea that stands alone in history, isolated from events unfolding around it; an event that is a representation of the past constructed by the dominant groups and classes of the time. The ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans was little more than recognition of cartographies that had already been drawn up. Enrique Dussel (1994) noted that the world map of Heinrich Hammer (also known as Henricus Martellus) had similarly revealed the presence of our continent as early as 1489.

Pomeranz (2004), Mignolo (2003) and Dussel (2004) have brought to the fore a number of political, economic and social factors that shaped Columbus’ adventure. It is worthy of note that, at the time, the mare nostrum was not known as the commercial ‘centre’ of the ‘inter-regional market’; at the time, the leading centre of trade was located between the East China Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Importantly, Europe needed China and, as Walter Mignolo (2001: 22) pointed out: ‘the Atlantic route emerges as a possibility following the Ottoman blockade of the route from China and India’. The role of China is critical to understanding Columbus and the formation of the world-system. Menzies (2003) and Dussel (2004) discuss how, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the Chinese had circumnavigated the planet. However, China abandoned its maritime domain in 1424 following a decision taken by the Ming emperors (1368–1644). This undoubtedly led to a vacuum of power and the growth of commercial shipping in the ‘market-world’, a fact that later benefited Europe in its endeavours. The measure taken by the empire excluded any possibility of China monopolising the Atlantic.

China was the ‘centre’ of the Euro-Afro-Asian market, and its technological, economic and military supremacy ensured that it was exempt from the need to reach across the sea; unlike the case in Europe.⁷ It was a simple commercial imperative for the Europeans to find a path to the East and, by relentlessly pursuing trade routes, European sailors inevitably came across a different continent, making the Atlantic theirs.

Walter