Contenu du sommaire : Les Amériques indiennes face au néolibéralisme

José Carlos Mariágegui's Marxist Indigenism
José Carlos Mariátegui was one of the first Latin-American Marxists to put forward a critical appraisal of the continent's Indian question. By this we refer to an analysis which not only recognizes the decisive role of the indigenous peasant masses as subjects of a revolutionary social transformation, but which also sees in the indigenous cultures and traditions one of the principal sources of an Indo-American socialism.

Autonomy, Indianity and Anticapitalism : The Zapatist Experience
Drawing on the analysis of several concrete aspects related to the construction of an autonomous organization in the regions where the EZLN is established, the article examines what autonomy means according to the Maya rebels of Chiapas. While the notion refers to the claiming of Indigenous Peoples' rights, it above all involves the choice of a strategy of struggle implying a turning away from the State structures and ultimately points to a project of radical transformation that comprehends all aspects of life. This essay tries therefore to account for the ways Indigenous Peoples' struggle for recognition and quest for autonomy, on the one hand, and the anti-capitalist nature of their endeavors on the other, are articulated within the very heart of the Zapatist Movement. It also shows that there is no essential incompatibility between an ethnically based claim and the anti-capitalist perspective.

All Homo Economicus, all different ! The Ideological Origins of Ethno-Capitalism
Numerous works have addressed the articulations between multiculturalism and neoliberalism in the Latin-American post-dictatorship context of the 1990s. Fewer are, by contrast, the studies that have focused on the ideological origins of what I would call differentialist Capitalism. My intention here is to fully comprehend how the “cultural” sphere was discovered, before being progressively colonized by the “economic” one. In order to do so, we will have to go back to the end of the 1970s, a period during which emancipatory ideas such as “cultural control” and “ethno-development” were taken over and resignified by the tenants of the neoliberal orthodoxy. An orthodoxy based on an anthropological credo that both reifies cultures and naturalizes the social order and managed to achieve massive hegemony within multilateral development agencies and the south-American elites.

Development, Ethnicity and “Ethnophagy” in the Northern Andes (Ecuador)In the last third of the 20th century, the social dynamic in the Ecuadorian Andes was subject to a series of significant changes : the emergence of a powerful Indian movement, on the one hand, and the reconfiguration of the role of the State, as a corollary of the implementation of structural adjustment policies, better known as “Washington Consensus”, on the other. In spite of the strengths of an Indian movement that found its roots in the agrarian reform of the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that the new neoliberal matrix led to the dissociation of rural development problem from the yet to be solved question of the concentration of land and wealth. By placing the emphasis on the politics of identity and on the organizational aspects of the Indian and peasant issue, the champions of ethno-development have downgraded any reference to the socioeconomic and political claims of the peasant populations.

From Multicultural Neoliberalism to Post-Multicultural Mobilizations (Chile). The notion of « neoliberal multiculturalism » has been adopted by critical anthropologists to characterize the dual movement of acknowledgement of cultural diversity and commodification. Nevertheless, in the Chilean case, it seems more appropriate to designate the multicultural mutation that took place in the 1990s, following the neoliberal revolution carried out during the dictatorship (1973-1989), by the term multicultural neoliberalism. For cultural diversity appears to be nothing more than one of the possible domains for the extension of the new neoliberal order. In this context, Indigenous peoples' social struggle is reduced to a merely cultural or ethnic set of demands. However we shall see that in recent social and environmental conflicts, where the issue at stake has been the question of common goods (education, health, and natural resources), mobilizations have tended to be unethnic and delineate a new post-multicultural space.

The Indian Issue : Between Neoliberalism, National-Populism, and Neodevelopmentism (Argentina). Approaches to the “Indian Issue” which fail to go beyond the mere charting of evolutions in legal norms or the articulation between neoliberalism and multiculturalism do not allow us to take the full measure of indigenous policies, in terms of the goal set for the enlargement of the spaces for public interpellation and the reconfiguration of ideas and practices pertaining to citizenship. Starting from the Argentine experience, the aim of this article is to examine the question of the sedimentation of neoliberal procedures, in a context marked by the will to re-appropriate national and popular sovereignty over territories and resources. The Indian question thus poses both the problem of the model of development that has been adopted and the question of the characterizing of the pleb (the category of the popular, or of those most underprivileged) as a part of the populus, that is, as part of the people of the nation, and therefore of the demos, understood as the space open to those who can legitimately give form and content to populus and who can put words on the world.

« The Land is Our Life ». The Relationships of the Toba of the Gran Chaco to their Territory
In the last two decades, the Argentine Chaco has been transformed into a land given over to the expansion of the “soy border”. As evidence of an aggressive policy of regional development, the process has gone along with an accelerating dyanmic of deforestation, an alteration of the ecosystem, the migration of the rural population, and repeated attempts to expel the indigenous communities. This article focuses on the tensions and the current political and environmental contradictions involved in these mutations. It addresses the question of the relations linking the toba (qom) communities to their lands and resources, and the effects on these communities of an extractivist model of development, implemented by left-leaning governments. Far from the exotic figure of an ecological Indian, the conceptions of life and of land fostered by the qom community are actually part of a specific ontology, in rupture with the dominant productivist and extractivist model.

Marx's Liberalism
The article re-examines Marx's liberal period as a contributor to and later as a member of the editorial board of the Rhenish Gazette and the question of the consequences of his liberalism on his transition to socialism. Far from claiming straight away to be the most politically radical of the young Hegelians, the young Marx outlined in his 1842-43 articles a version of moderate republicanism, close to that of Carl von Rotteck. It was by following the gradual distancing of the young Hegelians from liberalism and their concomitant radicalisation, that Marx successively adopted democratic and then socialist positions. This political and theoretical evolution is nonetheless predicated upon the anti-liberal elaboration of what had been a liberal problematic, formulated from 1842 : the question of the autonomy of society relative to the State. It was by way of the critical comprehension of the implications of this demand that Marx gradually arrives at the critique of the constitutional State as an abstract political sphere, and to the defense of a social self-organization for which the requisite is the prior transformation of the activity in question.

Weil as a Critic of Marxism: Lessons for a Reappraisal of the Question of the Organization of Work
Simone Weil was a sustained and trenchant critic of Marxism from 1930 till her death. In her writings as a philosopher she proposes a rereading of the Marxist analysis of the alienation of work, pointing to the inadequacies and illusions of Marx's project. Whereas Marx locates the origins of alienation (defined as the human subject's incapacity to comprehend its work) in the structure of the capitalist market, Weil is convinced that alienation stems from the very nature of the organization of work. The points of convergence between Marx and Weil are essential to an understanding of the philosophy of Simone Weil and to a fuller grasp of its originality and current relevance.

Marx in Bourdieu's Work : Frequent Approval, Radical Opposition
The aim of the present article is to examine the paradox that while Bourdieu appears to be highly favorable to Marx, there is a radical disagreement between their two theoretical systems. In Bourdieu's writing, comments favorable to Marx outweigh criticism by a ratio of 4,5 to 1. Marxists, in contrast, come in for ten times more criticism than support. Bourdieu's approval of Marx in fact concerns only what are secondary aspects, while the few critiques he addresses delineate a structural opposition between the two authors. Bourdieu rejects the theory of surplus value, the Marxist theory of exploitation, and the communist project. Among other things, he draws up a critique of Marx's analyses of the State, legitimation, social classes. Explanation for the paradox is to be sought in the strategy deployed by Bourdieu in the field of the social sciences.

The economics and politics of Thomas Piketty's Theses : I – Critical analysis
This the first part of a study (in two parts) devoted to Piketty's theses on the history of capitalism. A summary of Pikety's analysis is first presented, concerning the dynamics of total wealth (measured as a ratio to national income) and its components, and the tendency of wealth and income inequalities within major capitalist countries. The amplitude of the fall of total wealth in the United-Kingdom and France during World War I is questioned. Piketty explains the profile of these variables concerning wealth and wealth inequalities in reference to historical mechanisms in which the rate of growth of output, the rate of savings, and the return on wealth are considered. The relevance of these mechanisms is basically questioned. We interpret the third component of wealth, other domestic capital, as a form of the capital of enterprises and substitute an alternative, more performing, model to account for the profile of this variable.

Marx's Capital : What Interpretations and What Usage ?
In their debate here Jacques Bidet, Gérard Duménil and Urs Lindner confront their interpretations of Marx's Capital, discussing the usages to be made of it today. Questions addressed here include the place of the philosophy, economics, and social sciences, in the critique of political economy. They examine the points where Marx's analysis has been reformulated or completed, to what extent it has been rendered obsolete by historical evolutions, and in what respect it still retains its pertinence. These are the principal questions addressed in the discussion.