By MARCOS PAULO PEREIRA SON*
Commentary on the newly published book by Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
“As if this life were governed by evil demons, lovers of twists and turns and not of the straight line, by capricious satyrs and not by God, and may God forgive me, but sometimes I believe that God is in death and not in life, because death is eternal rest, the perpetual light of righteousness. On the other hand, life, what they call nature, is the work of the devil, who allies himself with beasts, snakes, and scorpions.”
(Juan Sebastian Cardenas, The devil of the provinces, P. 24).
From industry to neo-extractivism
A biologist who returns to his hometown, a dwarf town in the interior of Colombia, after his research grant abroad was cut, seeks to reinvent himself in a reality different from the one he left. His doctoral thesis dedicated to the study of the spectacled bear is considered a vulgar commodity, forcing him to accept the job that his mother, with her local political influences, found for him: as a biology teacher at a girls' boarding school immersed in Christian fundamentalism.
The melancholic and reflective atmosphere of the inevitable return to the past conveys a nostalgic aspect of what the city was and what it has become. The new urban reality epitomizes the economic transformations that Colombia, and Latin America as a whole, underwent during the transition from a Keynesian-Fordist accumulation regime to a flexible logic that eroded the social fabric built in the second half of the 20th century with the industrial impulse of the developmental cycle that characterized the subcontinent.
From memories, his uncle's farm with a mosaic garden that attracted birds, the house in the city center, going to the circus on weekends and the possibility of attending higher education in the local city, present the scenario of the transition from an agrarian-exporting reality to an urban-industrial one that characterized Latin American countries between the 1950s and 1980s with import substitution, which raised parts of the so-called national territories in the global logic of industrial valorization.
Alain Lipietz, in his book Mirages and miracles: problems of industrialization in the third world, outlines the particularities of this process of peripheral modernization in post-war capitalism, pointing out that the spatial construction of an industrial logic in the so-called “Third World” countries was characterized by the formation of an internal market that partially absorbed the population of these countries into the circles of industrial consumption. Unlike the construction of the welfare-state in central countries, here the right to consumption would be limited to the middle class and specialized factory workers. Despite the delimitation of a modest percentage of the population, a rigid social fabric was created, based on industrial production that organized the productive system according to the class divisions typical of the capitalist system.
With the collapse of the development cycle experience that occurred as a result of foreign debt, the debt crises in Latin American countries during the 1980s pointed to the collapse of the statist-competitive model that had shaped the productive structures until then. Without overcoming their peripheral condition by not reaching the average industrial age of the central countries, development planners saw in the inflationary spiral the symptoms of a reality that was impossible to forge, that is, a national capitalist accumulation that would transform the periphery into the center.
The way found to overcome the crisis in which the countries found themselves was a new modernization shock that redefined international exchanges, undermining the industrial sector that was in its infancy, boosting neo-extractivism.[I] which would generate international currency to pay off the galloping debts of their countries.
This transition from an industrial logic to a new modernization, based on access capitalism[ii], scares the biologist who returns more than a decade later, with new aspects: a new urban architectural modeling, expanding its fabric beyond the central regions; advance of monoculture agricultural standardization shaping the landscape; expropriation of local communities for infrastructure projects and land disputes between family producers and farmers; advance of fundamentalist mirages that justify the new precarious workers as the new self-made man.
The outbreak of a new modernization?
Throughout the novel, the spatial transformations that bring about a discomfort that the biologist does not know how to verbalize demonstrate the modernizing advances of a new logic of valorization imposed by flexible accumulation on the periphery of capitalism during the 2000st century. If among his memories there is an association between the “archaic” and the “modern” (his uncle’s farm vs. his house in the city) in the dwarf city, what he understands in the current direction of his birthplace is a modernizing surge, a consequence of the unbridled exploitation of natural resources during the XNUMXs, which reorganized the national productive structure towards an extractive logic, financing a new social division of labor in Latin America.
The circus that has become a supermarket, the family home that has been sold, the new workers in the service sector and the affordable housing developments represent the consequences of a modernizing process. Despite its apparent progress, with city residents celebrating the new functioning of the urban organism, what we see are monetary subjects without money.[iii], that is, the population inserted in the expanded reproduction of the commodity-producing system, but expropriated from their conditions of social reproduction based not entirely on the mediation of the commodity. If before they were small family producers, today they are supermarket vendors spread throughout the city, who circulate in the labor market and vary between salaried workers and a reserve army, dependent on credit to consume.
The mystery surrounding the city is this new logic of valorization, which distributes resources irregularly, changing its landscape and bringing about the collapse of the foundation of social reproduction for the inhabitants of a former village that has been transformed into an environment marked by the dictates of current globalization. If during the development cycle there were attempts to build an industrial class society, in recent years what our biologist sees is expressed in the precariousness of work that formalizes illegalities as a new source of valorization.
*Marcos Paulo Pereira Jr. is a geography major at USP.
Reference
Juan Sebastian Cardenas. The Devil of the Provinces: A Fable in Miniatures. Translation: Marina Waquil. New York, DBA Editora, 2024, 130 pages. [https://amzn.to/3YyKRKs]
Notes
[I] https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/o-que-vem-depois-do-neoliberalismo/
[ii] cf. ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. Extinção. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2007.
[iii] cf. KURZ, R. The collapse of modernization. From the collapse of barracks socialism to the crisis of the world economy. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, 1993.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
