Epilogue
[1]
“Rupturas:” Turning Points
The following is Gustavo Esteva’s response to a
reading of the dissertation. He felt there needed to be more clarity and
coherence in the account of his “turning points” which he calls rupturas. He urged me to integrate into the existing
text whatever parts I felt would strengthen the narrative account of his
intellectual journey. I decided that rather than try to fit it into various
parts of the dissertation, it made more sense to present it as a whole.
Therefore I present here my translation of Gustavo Esteva’s own account of his
turning points or “rupturas.”[2]
My
childhood education immersed me in a system of beliefs which, from a distance,
seem ingenuous and dogmatic: the religiosity of my mother and her family (with
inspirational elements from my grandmother) and the catholic indoctrination of
the Marist priests in school. At the same time I was learning the Western
behavioral manners of a middle class child of
This system of beliefs was going to unexpectedly change when I tried to affirm and consolidate it through further studies with the Jesuits- particularly under the guidance of an interesting philosopher named father José Sánchez Villaseñor. I came to him full of faith, with a simple question: Is it possible to get a rational demonstration of the existence of God? The question did not come from any kind of personal or religious metaphysical doubt, but only as a way to strengthen my faith and prepare myself to defend it before non believers. He smiled and in a very gentle way answered that yes, of course, it is possible to formulate rational proofs of God’s existence. And he gave me something to read. Every other week, for two years, I came back to him, telling him that yes, the arguments of Anselm, or Thomas, or Augustine, were very interesting, but they did not offer a solid, rational proof of the existence of God. And so, one day, because he had enough of me or because he assumed that the lesson had been taught, he told me: “No, son, you cannot rationally prove the existence of God, but you cannot tell that to everybody; to do that may weaken the faith of many”. I came out of his office with a feeling of relief: I would no longer have to read all those boring books… But I was only a few minutes away from his office when I suddenly discovered that my faith had vanished, that the very solid collection of beliefs that in the first place brought me to father Sánchez Villaseñor, in order to affirm such faith and be able to defend it, that faith was no longer there.
Sánchez Villaseñor, intentionally or not, equipped me with some of the tools of the Western, classical form of rationalizing faith; to the use of reason to consolidate faith and guide behavior. This use of reason, however, led me to systematically question the very foundations of my. Reason became a substitute for God, without my knowing it; it became the ultimate referent, valid in and of itself. This new consciousness, typically Western for both believers and non believers, presupposed a trust in reason that assumed it to be the objective and solid foundation of all human thought and behavior. One had the impression that you don’t have a belief in something (in reason), but rather that reason has succeeded in establishing itself as the ultimate horizon of intelligibility: it is not something in which you believe, but something you “know.” Its condition as faith is thus hidden. As the Spanish poet Machado said, “faith is not a matter of seeing something, or believing in something, but rather in believing that one sees.” What I saw, then, without believing I believed in it, was that reason (and ultimately science) gave me a true way to see the world. From that perspective, the fantasies, tricks, errors or illusions of reason, could only be attributed to my own limitations and not to reason itself.
As
I traveled in this intellectual and experiential journey, I acquired, through
my university studies, the technological-scientific rationality of management.
In that way I incorporated myself within the dominant Western horizon.
When
I discovered that, without my knowing it, I had lost the catholic faith in
which I had been educated, I became aware that reason, in and of itself, in all
its coldness and limitations, could not satisfactorily take the place of my
belief in God and in the rituals and practices that constituted my religiosity.
With this rupture I experienced a sensation of emptiness, a void that had to be
filled. What I knew at the time of Western philosophy was not enough to fill
the emptiness. I began to search, in the most chaotic form, without personal or
institutional direction, for some philosophical system that would rescue me
from that feeling of emptiness. I read
Hindu literature (like Swami Vivekanaanda), became familiar with some esoteric
schools of thought, and studied certain versions of existentialism. None of
these searches produced satisfactory results. I remained in a state of anxiety.
I sought out philosophical texts to help me think things through. In one of my
searches I found, in a shop of used books, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology.”
I was fascinated by it and I sought out more texts like it. This line of
thinking was reinforced by the lectures of Juan David García Bacca, a great
Catalan philosopher with Marxist leanings to whom I was introduced by my
college professor, Alfonso Zahar. Zahar, who became a father figure after the
death of my father, encouraged me to study for a career in administration. He
got me a job in the Bank of Commerce and helped me advance my career there. A
philosopher himself (and a high officer in the Bank!), Zahar also guided my
first steps in the exploration of philosophy, suggesting a variety of readings,
including Invitation to Philosophize,
a book by García Bacca. This book enlightened this part of my journey and
surely contributed to my immersion in the Marxist vision of the world.
What I want to emphasize here is that Marx’s philosophy became such an integral part of my thinking and my behavior that it came to fill the void produced by the first rupture [with Catholic religiosity and God]. Marx’s ideas came to me with force and passion, with the capacity to guide me and mobilize me. Through Marx I became firmly ensconced in the Western horizon of intelligibility, in which I was to remain for the following decades.
Having been educated by the Jesuits, there were always, behind the technical and scientific lessons for a career in administration, moral teachings. The goal was to teach us ideas of social justice and professional integrity so that we could incorporate these ideals within the capitalist framework by “giving everything to everyone” and “giving each individual that which they deserved.” As professional managers we would be involved in the fair distribution of the outcome of the collective efforts of society. We would provide good products and services to the community and good salaries and working conditions to the workers as well as profits to the entrepreneurs. For example, in my area of specialization, personnel management, the goal was to find the right man for the job (satisfying the interests of the company) and the appropriate job for the man (satisfying the interests of the worker). Success in one’s professional job required that we satisfied everyone’s needs and thus lived up to our moral principles and fulfilled the ideals of social justice. In all this, there was the assumption that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with some people being more equal than others, that some received a larger portion of the “social pie” than others.
I immersed myself in that world without questioning any of these assumptions. I accepted as my own the interests of the companies in which I worked, assuming without serious critical thought that I was performing an important social function. Part of my function, as personnel manager, was to contribute to a process of indoctrination that forged loyalty of the workers to the company. The workers had to submit to that ideological straightjacket, according to which to struggle for the good of the company meant to struggle for one’s own interests.
When I experienced a clash with reality, it truly came as a surprise and it took me years to assimilate. Suddenly, it became evident that the interests of the workers could be in conflict to those of the company. I was only 18 years old when I became assistant manager of a small company and for the first time had to deal directly with workers. There I experienced a situation that I had never had to confront at the Bank of Commerce. At the Bank, the workers, government officials, managers, and owners all seemed to be part of one big social group with common interests: to serve the Bank’s clients for the benefit of all who worked at the bank…and its clients and shareholders. There, nothing that happened seemed to clash with the interests of the people who worked there. In contrast, at the small company (Modopak) where I began working, the contradictions were more evident. Later, at larger corporations like IBM, Procter and Gamble, Cervecería Moctezuma, and companies to which I provided consultant services, the clash was more evident and the situation became more uncomfortable for me.
Despite
the personal discomfort brought about by an increasing awareness of the fraud
of the original promise of my profession, I advanced rapidly in my career. I
was, without doubt, the person from my generation who achieved the most
spectacular upward advancement at that time. At the same time, however, I was
experiencing, all around me, social and political phenomena that shook my
convictions, phenomena which my leftist readings, predominantly Marxist, helped
explain. In 1958, when I was finishing up my studies and had already established
myself as a professional manager in the corporate world, there were huge union
and popular protests which ended in a massive repression. The next year the
Cuban revolutionaries triumphed. In
I
cannot reconstruct here the specific circumstances which finally drove me to
abandon my career, after being fired from IBM and Procter & Gamble but
still having great success in my own professional bureau. I turned over that
business to those working with me. I took a minor post with the Ministry of Finances
just to survive, to support my family (by then my first daughter was born). At
the same time, with friends I had met along the way, outside my professional
work, I begin to prepare for revolutionary action. A little later, some of my
leftist friends helped me get a job at the National Bank of Foreign Trade, a
public agency, where I became editor of a journal that was to become the best
economics journal in
Unlike my first “ruptura” [turning point], this one did not have its “day of illumination.” It came about with the accumulation of experiences and anxieties. It became clear to me that to continue my career meant to become an accomplice of those who were the source of injustice and exploitation in society. It also became evident to me that it was my obligation to commit my life to the struggle for social justice, with the revolution, even though it was not clear to me how I could do it. Through discussions and readings with various friends, I was able to think through and articulate a clear critique of the Soviet world--of their version of socialism—and to explore options, within the framework of revolutionary thought, inspired by Mao and the Cuban experience. This critique was always accompanied by a strong, passionate “anti-imperialist” sentiment. The revolutionary struggle was necessarily international, with a clearly identified enemy.
The rupture with my profession was not really with the profession itself. Essentially it represented my taking sides in the social struggle, which implied going against my employers in the private sector or with the State (which through our Marxist eyes, we saw as an administrative board of capital, which in Mexico included the corporate type of labor and peasant organizations controlled by the State). For me, it was not a question of abandoning the science of administration or its techniques. They only needed to be “cleansed” of their capitalist elements. Much less did it imply the abandonment of Western rationality as a horizon of intelligibility. On the contrary, I immersed myself more deeply in it, in its Marxist version. This can be the most dogmatic form of rationality, the most blindly given over to its own modes of perception as an expression of “the truth,” rationalized by the science of historical materialism.
One
day there appeared at my office in the Bank of Foreign Trade an old militant of
the Mexican left who had gone through the Communist Part and various other
groups and was now forming a new “party,” or “vanguard of the proletariat”,
with a guerilla orientation. When he arrived and we started talking, I found
myself already ideologically prepared for what he was cooking up. My
revolutionary conviction was by now clear to me. (Shortly before, this with
other friends, we had already planned a crazy plot to go help the Cubans at the
This process lasted several years. On the one hand, it was gratifying to be part of a revolutionary group, with everything ahead of us. I enjoyed the emotion of being part of clandestine meetings, the advances we made in our theoretical and political reflections and writings, the climate of solidarity and camaraderie, the dedication of a whole life to a superior cause. On the other hand, I resented our incapacity for practical action. One could apply to us a modified version of Che’s Guevara’s phrase: ‘The obligation of all revolutionaries is to …have a meeting”. We got together all the time to discuss and argue. Not only did we spend all our time preparing for action that never came, but I could see the contrast between our “actions” (which was mostly talk, while we continued living our middle class lives) and the real condition of those groups which we contacted or recruited, particularly the campesinos (peasants). I found that the campesinos had the courage required for action and an organizational and decision-making ability superior to our own. It was not clear to me why we should consider ourselves to be their “leaders”, the ones who would lead them on the road to revolution, when it was evident that they had more experience and greater abilities for struggle than we did. I was also experiencing a growing feeling of uneasiness because of our position on violence. We accepted, as a given, its validity and legitimacy. There were no moral doubts over the necessity and convenience of using violence (we did not see any other way of making the revolution; a revolution whose legitimacy and necessity seemed entirely evident to us). But it was not pleasant to live with the consequences of that attitude, to observe how, among us, the capacity to use violence became a decisive merit, stronger than any argument.
An incident in which the leader who had recruited me into the group killed another leader because of jealousy, hid in my house and put us all in jeopardy by protecting him (in order to protect ourselves), finally made me see the light. These were the conditions of violence which we were imposing on ourselves and wanted to impose on all of society. I could not continue on that path. Again, I experienced a rupture in my life. I remained respectful and understanding of those who continued on that path and tried to bring about revolutionary change through guerrilla action. But I stopped thinking that it was the only path, and in any case, it was clear to me that it was not my path. I was not willing to be part of any effort that would bring about all forms of violence, particularly against those to whose cause we wanted to dedicate ourselves to. Without a clear path in sight, without an articulate position on nonviolence (I was just beginning to read Gandhi), I decided to explore some other paths.
At that time, in the 60s, none of the existing political organizations seemed acceptable. We had submitted all of them to a radical critique. When I accepted an important position in government, I did not do it with the idea of making the revolution from within government, or to promote relevant social change. I needed a salary and I sought refuge in my work, while I was still trying to achieve some clarity within me and about what to do. In the following years, while I worked in the office of the President in charge of planning the public budget, I dedicated a good part of my free time, many hours and days of work, to the writing of my first book: Economy and Alienation. I would close myself in my room, separating the intellectual activity from the rest of the things I was doing. It is perhaps the only one of my texts to which I seriously dedicated a prolonged effort of research and reflection. It is a book which I still value and which contains arguments and reflective analysis which I still support. It allowed me to formulate a conception of the world and an attitude towards change that does not require violence.
Not long after I finished the book, which was published ten years later in a very condensed version, I was presented with the opportunity to work in another government agency in a radically different context. It involved doing things, not just planning them; and moreover, doing them in the populist, socially and politically committed environment of President Echeverría's government. It involved, above all, working with the campesinos, who, along the way, I had discovered to be a radical source for hope. It became possible, after the ambiguous and distant job at the office of the President, to commit all my passion and effort to the task at hand. Thus I started the 70s.
My years at CONASUPO [National Corporation for Popular Subsistence- a peculiar agency associated with basic staples both in the cities and the countryside] consisted of a feverish pitch of activities. I had an opportunity to design and implement social programs that involved millions of peasants and urban marginal. We used cutting edge approaches with the participation of very progressive and committed work teams. By 1976, when I was in a high level position with access to the new President of Mexico, I had arrived at some very clear convictions. The first one was that the logic of the government’s interests and those of the people could never be the same. Although their respective interests seem some times to overlap, and they need each other, it was evident to me that the government cannot do what the people want and need: its real and main function is to control the people, not to serve them. It was also clear to me that even the best “development programs”, such as the ones we had organized, were harmful to the supposed beneficiaries. I didn’t know why this was so, only that it was obviously the case. A long session with [President] López Portillo and his top advisors two weeks before he took office removed any doubts for me as to the path I should take. In that session the President announced unequivocally that his policies would be adverse to the peasants. Five days after this session I initiated the first of two non profit organizations, entering thus the world of civil society in which I have been working since then.
The
decade of the 70s was a period of substantive change in my theoretical and
ideological position. I took part in a very intense debate regarding the
peasants. The debate took place throughout
In that process, through which I came closer and closer in contact with the concrete activities of peasants, I was able to question the categories of all the disciplines in which I had been educated or which I had learned on my own. I began to formulate a radical critique of development. This change in my thinking could be clearly seen in the name of an umbrella organization, Analysis, Development and Gestión, created in 1979 to coordinate the actions of many other NGOs we had constituted in that period. The name of the organization reflected what we thought we needed to do for the groups for which we worked at the grassroots. After three years of listening to them and observing what they were doing, we changed the name of the organization to Autonomy, Decentralism[3], and Gestión. Throughout the 1980s my critique of development deepened, especially after I came into contact with Ivan Illich and his friends and other radical thinkers and activists from diverse parts of the globe.
I began the decade of the 80s with a frenzy of activity in many areas, but with a sensation of emptiness similar to what I felt as an adolescent. I could not process my experiences with the peasants and the urban marginal with the technical lenses, with the formal categories, the words (doors to perception) that I was using at the time. A number of life events, awards and positions, such as the National Economics Prize (1978), the presidency of the Fifth World Congress of Rural Sociology (1980), the presidency of the Mexican Planning Society and the vice-presidency of the Inter-American Planning Society (1982), the publication of my books, and many other factors gave me a growing sense of security in my ideas. But at the same time, I had a growing distrust in the underlying foundations of those ideas. I could not process with them my experiences at the grassroots.
I
suspect that the most important rupture in my life occurred when I began to
remember my experiences with my grandmother as a child. She could not come to
our house in
The
rupture with previous ways of thinking and acting is clearly evident in the
80s. What I did and what I wrote clearly illustrates it. I still, however,
found myself, especially in the sphere of ideas, rooted in the Western horizon
of intelligibility. Only after moving to live in the Zapotec
The last 25 years, as a whole, represent several things. Foremost, it represents the radical abandonment of the idea of the “vanguard” or of “agency” in social change, by an “enlightened” person or a group who theoretically knows or intuits the sense of change and sets out to guide people towards that change. More and more I found that my task was to articulate my experiences and perceptions among peasants, Indians, and marginal, and to return these articulations to them as an affirmation or as a coherent expression of their own actions. This is what I have called the “aha!” effect and the idea of commotion (instead of promotion). This requires that I share their horizon of intelligibility or at least engage in a deep intercultural dialogue.
On the other hand, the deepening of the critique of development led me, with Illich’s enlightening, to a radical critique of economic society, which in turn led me to abandon Marxism. This critique was generalized to include all modern institutions, in particular those associated with the notion and structure of political power. Such critique of the economic society includes both its capitalist and socialist versions.
Finally, perhaps more important, I adopted Gandhi’s principle, even before I discovered it in his writings: “Be the change you want for the world.” My need for coherence between my perceptions and my practice--an aspect of my history whose origin I do not know, but which is clearly a characteristic that marks it from beginning to end and which determines the practical consequences of each ideological rupture—required me, from the time I began to work directly with peasant and Indian groups, to share their lives, to put into practice in my daily life the ideas that I learned from them and which I articulated in my writings or in my actions.
I have lived for many years--and I still live--a flagrant contradiction between my capacities as a leader and my radical, existential, resistance to positions of power; something that is very clear since my rupture in 1976. My attitudes, my actions, and my practices, continually lead to situations where I am asked to assume a leadership role, to exercise in some way a function of “leading others.” At the same time, I emphatically question that role, as much because of the conception of power to which it corresponds, as to its practical implications. I am convinced that no one should lead anyone else, i.e. to play the role of a God. Clearly, from this posture are derived, partly, my critiques of all forms of education, critiques nurtured by Illich but which are applied to many other fields. In these circumstances, the challenge consists, in continuing to share my experiences, what I have learned up until now, relating them to relevant initiatives, without imposing them on others, without taking advantage of my abilities to persuade, to write or articulate, using them to “guide” others through the path that I have found. Obviously, I do not reject my practical responsibility: to make decisions, affirm them, make them valid, to turn myself into a resonance box of the music I hear in my small world of Indians, peasants, marginal, or deprofessionalized intellectuals like me. I make that resonance box vibrate, conscious that I am not creating music, and I seek that it be listened to, but being careful that what comes out of it, that specific voice, my voice, is not mistaken for my “self”: that the content of that voice, that discourse, not be attributed to me, as a person, to construct me as a personal guide. I want people to hear in that voice the music from the depths, from those who are truly composing it. I want them to see where it is coming from, so that everyone may take from it what they like, what is useful to them. From this position arises that vision of myself as a nomadic storyteller: to tell stories as a way of sharing an experience, a vision of the world (which is not mine, not my property, not my individual construction). I hope that those who listen to these stories can take from them what is relevant for them. In that way we learn together what this thing we call living is about.
[1]
From Gustavo Terán’s Doctoral Disertation “Conversations with Mexican Nomadic
Storyteller, Gustavo Esteva: Learning from Lives on the Margins”, 2002.
[2]
I introduced a few editorial changes and some notes in Terán’s translation, for
clarification, when I decided to share these materials with the participants in
the search/research adventure. What I originally prepared was a reaction to
Terán’s presentation, within the kind of intimate, warm dialogue we were having
about our stories.
[3]
Decentralism –the assumption that there is no center, that every group or
community is the center for itself- was for us the opposite to both public and
private decentralization in capitalist countries and the “democratic
centralism” that was the euphemism used in the “socialist” countries for their
authoritarian centralism.