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
