By Wilson García Mérida
February 8, 2009
Los Tiempos
Translated by Scott Campbell
Anarchism, according to prejudiced state idolizers, is a destructive doctrine, a negator of everything in existence. And they take it upon themselves to show how those who call themselves “anarchos” worship extreme moral sloppiness and the most abusive lack of discipline, as if anarchism was simply a state of mind.
Nevertheless, Cesáreo Capriles showed that anarchism – as a doctrine founded on two pillars: emotional intelligence and scientific knowledge – is not a phase of dissenting adolescents. It is a vision for life, an everyday praxis that constructs clear bridges between words and action, which demands high degrees of ethical and aesthetic responsibility. Therefore, anarchism is an extraordinary political option because it comes from the non-political. It is the counter-force, the counter-hegemony in contrast to the established order; it is civil society (or the daily life of the “small people” as an insidious Banzerist MAS councilor [1] arrogantly called us) facing the grandiloquent hypocrisy and corruption of political society. Civil society is the work ethic, the plain knowledge of the indigenous, the clarity of the class-conscious worker. Political society is the parasitism of partisan demagoguery, the corruption of the urbanized cholo [2], the indolence of the wealthy.
Cesáreo Capriles rationalized his irreverence, limiting it to this dichotomy, this clash between the ethical and the political – in which anarchism assumes militancy in a civil society seeking a just balance in the face of political society’s overflowing scandals. In the end, Don Cesáreo was conservatively respectful of the human condition and its divine imperfection; optimistic and playful about life and its joys in spite of everything else.
This constructive conception of anarchism, this alternative of real change, is reflected in the pages of “Art and Work”. Its visionary editorials in the early 1920s proposed the need to support the Engineers Regiment led by Colonel Federico Román to build a road from Cochabamba to Beni (a project that to this day remains incomplete); or showed the practicality of financing – with a group of “men of goodwill” – that Cochabamban business which in 1925 came to be Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano [3].
The Chaco War quashed this communal construction that was emerging in Cochabamba, split the public sphere and left us in 1952 with a revolution very poorly executed by the partyocracy on duty.
Translator’s notes:
[1] Banzer was a right-wing dictator and later president of Bolivia. MAS is the leftist party of current president Evo Morales.
[2] Cholo is the Andean formulation of mestizo.
[3] Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano was, until 2007, the national airline of Bolivia.
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