SACRIFICE, PRODUCTIVISM AND PERONISM

Today we will focus on the notion of sacrifice thought from the political economy, and particularly from the open discussions around Peronism.

We take an audio-visual appointment (which we present transcribed and translated), this is a fragment of the film "Juan Domingo Perón - Actualización política y doctrinal para la toma del poder" (1971) by the filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, both referents of the group "Cine Liberación". The film is basically a series of extensive interviews that the filmmakers do with Juan Domingo Perón during the last part of his exile in Madrid.

In the interview, referring to the positioning of Peronism as a particular form of third way, in particular to the criticism of liberal and socialist productivist projects, General Perón introduces the notion of sacrifice to name and think the processes of exploitation of the working masses . In the Peron trial, both capitalism and real socialisms had failed to "sacrifice" people, in the words of Juan Domingo Perón:

"(...) Between the international dogmatic Socialism and Capitalism the difference is not so remarkable, because one is a state capitalism and the other, it is an individualistic capitalism. (...) Both submit, and also obtain great But both, in my opinion, are based on the sacrifice of the peoples.

We want that sacrifice to disappear and that the same work be done without sacrifice, only with effort. That is justicialismo. Now, that is socialist, natural that is socialist, because it seeks those forms of coexistence with great accent in the social aspect. That is, that man belongs to the community but the community also belongs to man. That is to say, for us, the justicialista government is the one that serves the people, that does not serve any other interest that is not the people and does what the people want. And within those forms, he fights for the greatness of the community in which he lives. Combining the individual with the collective is our revolutionary project, and doing so is one of the forms of socialism. " (Perón, J.D. 1971).

The notion of sacrifice used by Perón operates as a political and discursive resource, focused on a development model oriented to industrial development and wage labor. Acording to Perón, his third way model it would have to "harmonize the individual with the collective", in this last dilemma we can see the underlying tension between in one hand, the general interests of the nation and the people, and the particular interest on the other. In this sense, although the metaphor used by Perón is interesting, the centrality of popular masses and working people as subject of analysis leaves out other forms of productivist sacrifice over territories, territories sacrificed by the totemic legitimacy of the Nation State, which expressed itself in trajectories productive as the YPF,  state in energy and hydrocarbons since the 1920s, a company whose metabolism has marked not only the imaginary and patrimonialized representations of its productive history, but also in its environments and landscapes. 

Although, Perón boosted the productive development with the purpose of strengthening the national industry and with it, to strengthen the workers' social rights and the centrality of the work. However, this development strategy would lead to the productivist paradox that social justice would entail expressions of environmental injustices in relation to the unequal distribution of the costs of progress (Faburel, 2010).

Environmental costs that would be assumed by communities in the provinces, far from the urban centers of power, giving an account of geographies of control (Massey, 1994).

The french philosopher Réne Girard has argued that sacrifice is an ambivalent force, simultaneously criminal and sanctified (Girard, 1972). Under a productivist matrix, the rejection of the sacrifice of the people as workers massas, would necessarily lead to the sacrifice of territories and communities.

We believe that this point opens the possibility of new questions and reflections on the zones of sacrifice, resuming and expanding the use of worker sacrifice as exploitation of workers towards a conception of sacrifice as a form of alienation of space within the framework of a vision of the historical process that contribute to overcome the encapsulation of critical environmental thinking in the neoliberal conjuncture.

REFERENCE

-Faburel, Guillaume. 2010. “Current Debates on Environmental in-equities. Greening on urban spaces”, Justice Spatiale/Spatial Justice N°2.

-Girard, Réne. 1972. La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle.

-Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

-Perón, Juan .Domingo (1971) In: Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio (dirs.) Juan Domingo Perón - Actualización política y doctrinal para la toma del poder, min. 2:04 h. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5qj3y9D1EM

METAPHOR QUOTES I. ANN STOLER AND DEBRIS

In the first quote for metaphors in D.R.O, I take some few lines from the introduction of Imperial Debris´s book edited by Ann Laura Stoler (2013). In the introduction -written by Stoler- Metaphors are linkage to the knowledge beyond representation, from the no spoken in the field of concepts, a beautiful and powerful paragraph, I rescue this text for the blog.

“In the absence of concepts, metaphors speaks to the no spoken, to the non conceptual sensibilities that escape consolidated conceptualized forms” (Stoler, 2013: x)

The silence, the absence and forms of knowledge beyond the conceptual frames of thought, expressed the power of metaphor. We proposed to used the ruins as metaphors of affective shapes and also as metonymy of a destruction and creation in the history of nature, society and capitalism. Words, sounds, aesthetics, forgotten architectures and material wounds of landscape it can be thought as metaphors in our search for the the ruins of oblivion.
The spatial and material debris as metaphors of empire and the traces of History of violence and destruction. 

BENJAMIN: RUINS, HISTORY AND PROGRESS

This blog, silently accompanies a research project that has in the poetic, rhetorical and theoretical figure of ruin one of its main instruments of reflection, Ruin as a metaphor of spatial processes, historical dynamics, ruin has been rescued by multiple Classical authors as contemporaries as a powerful metaphor for space thinking, which has sparked interesting contemporary discussions about the utility, wealth and heuristic power of the figure of the Ruin, we hope to pick up some of those discussions later, notwithstanding this blog Bet on the Ruin, in fact it is present from its title, its aesthetic proposal and also theoretical.

Source:https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/ 

I affirm that theoretical relevance of Ruin as a figure is based on its multiplicity. For express this, I take a classical quotation from Walter Benjamin, one of the classic authors in the use of the Ruin to think critically about modernity. In his famous Theses on History, Benjamin comments on a picture and a poem, in what is called Thesis IX:

“My wing is ready for flight,

I would like to turn back.

If I stayed everliving time,

I'd still have little luck.

—Gerhard Scholem, "Greetings from the Angelus"

“There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows ward the sky. What we call progress is this storm” (Benjamin, 2006 [1940]:392)

In this brief aphorism we can rescue a series of interesting elements, Benjamin makes this comment from a pair of artistic elements, on the one hand, a poem by Gerhard Scholem entitled "Gruss for Angelus", on the other, a painting painted in Watercolor by the Swiss painter Paul Klee that Benjamin would acquire. From both artistic references of aesthetics and poetry, they unleash a series of reflections intensely chained in a fragment in which artistic inspiration forms a deep criticism of the idea of ​​modern progress. In this critique, destruction appears as a historical regularity, the Angel of History looking at the past, interprets the course of history as an accumulation of destruction, ruins and debris, Western history and the state of modernity Can´t be thought in abstraction from the destruction produced by it, modernity and progress are interpreted as a storm unleashed from paradise.

The Ruin is a powerful metaphor for thinking and rethinking space and history, the Ruin is a multiple figure in the rhetoric, poetic, aesthetic as well as theoretical and philosophical dimensions, its use opens encounter bridges for social sciences, Humanities and art, and in this way it constitutes a hybrid category that crosses disciplines and sensibilities. Ruin not only allows us to rethink progress and modernity, but also the logics of capital production and its incessant dialectic of destruction and creation. The Ruin allows us to interweave art, philosophy, memory, materiality, time, beauty and violence.

The historian Ann Stoler (2013) has proposed a turn in the approaches of ruin, transiting from the ruins as objects to the ruination as dynamic processes. We followed the dialectical point of view of George Lukacs (1971) when he stated that things must to be shown as aspects of processes, in the same way, ruins are not things in the present but relations between men, things, materials, politics and economics in history and space.

Through the ruin we can read the strong and fragility of  capitalism, the state, the culture and the nature. That’s what we tried in this blog with the desert ruins of oblivion.

REFERENCES

- Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “On the Concept of History”. In: Eliand, H and Jenning, M (eds). Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 4 1938-1940. Pp. 389-411.

-Lukacs, George. 1971. “History and Class Consciousness”. Cambridge: MIT Press.

-Stoler, Ann. 2013. "Introduction". In: Stoler, A (Ed). Imperial Debris: on ruins and ruination, Durham: Duke University Press.Pp. 1-37