Edited by STEPHAN FEUCHTWANG and ALPA SHAH
ISBN-13:978-1542490030
ISBN-10:1542490030
Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
Published November 2015
© The individual contributors and OAC Press, 2015
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Citation URL: https://openanthcoop.net/emancipatory-politics-a-critique/
This volume shows that organised emancipatory politics, in part or mainly reinforced by arms, is still very much alive in a range of postcolonial states. By ‘emancipatory politics’ we mean political activities that aim to end exploitation and enhance participatory democracy through which leadership can be held to account on a daily as well as periodic basis, in the workplace and beyond. Whether it be India, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru or Columbia, long-standing armed movements aiming to seize and transform state power are still burning and working for a different future. In Euro-American debate it is easy to forget those movements – some of which have a more than forty-year history – of the Maoists in India or Nepal, FARC in Columbia, or the Communist Party of the Philippines. We focus here on movements that are still very much active as well as on movements of Marxist emancipatory change that achieved state power – the Mozambican case of Frelimo and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua – whose experiences shed an important critical light on those that are still in active struggle.
These cases have been chosen to illustrate a range of reasons for embarking on and sustaining armed struggle. We show that questions of ideological, political and economic organization strongly influence the specifically military aspects of these movements. Most are adaptations of Mao’s Chinese revolutionary movement and its tenets, but some refer to other revolutionary traditions. The selection is not meant to be comprehensive, but to focus on the reasons for and history of movements of this kind, highlighting the limitations that this mobilisation and its ties to Maoist teachings have placed on their emancipatory politics.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Emancipatory Politics: A Critique
Stephan Feuchtwang and Alpa Shah
Part 1. Armed movements in India
Chapter 2 The People’s Will to Change to Changing the Will of the People: Reflections on the Indian Maoist Struggle
Gautam Navlakha
Chapter 3 Unconventional Politics: Prelude to a Critique of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy in India
Bernard D’Mello
Part 2. Armed movements in Latin America and the Philippines
Chapter 4 The FARC-EP and Consequential Marxism in Columbia
James J. Brittain
Chapter 5 Ups and Downs of a Contemporary Maoist Movement: Shifting Tactics, Moving Targets and (Un)Orthodox Strategy, the Philippine Revolution in Perspective
Dominique Caouette
Part 3. Armed movements and state formation in Nepal, Nicaragua and Mozambique
Chapter 6 Identity Politics and the Maoist People’s War in Nepal
Anne de Sales
Chapter 7 The Sandinistas, Armed Struggle, Participation, Democracy, Verticalism and Mass Movements in Nicaragua
Harry E. Vanden
Chapter 8 The Politics of Production, Frelimo and Socialist Agrarian Strategy in Mozambique
Bridget O’Laughlin
Epilogue
Chapter 9 Further Theoretical Reflections on Emancipatory Politics
Stephan Feuchtwang and Alpa Shah
