Reimagining the State

Abstract

Reimagining the State Lisa Duggan (bio) What is the state? How do we grasp it, engage it, transform it? These are the broad questions to which this issue of WSQ is addressed. The articles and reviews here take concrete historical approaches to the dilemmas that social movements face in relation to state formations, as they are intertwined with racial capitalism and with shifting arrangements of intimacy and care. Right now, it can seem that the primary options are (1) grassroots organizing against the punitive, coercive, violent carceral and surveillance state, as in prison abolition and campaigns to defund the police; (2) social democratic reforms to claim state resources, as in the fight for universal accessible health- and childcare; or (3) organizing to protest the exploitation and violence at the nexus of corporate and state profit machines, as in protests of oil pipelines and environmental degradation. As this issue shows, the landscape of possibility is more complicated—these options overlap and are always shifting. And the deep intersections of formations of class, race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, religion, and ability defy any easy division between class and so-called identity politics. The materiality of everyday life draws us into the ways class is lived as race, gender is deployed by religion, and Indigenous history upends common assumptions about states and sovereignty. In this essay, I want to provide two examples of political dilemmas and interventions that illuminate some dead ends and some new thinking about social movements and the state. The first is from Latin America and the second from Palestine. [End Page 243] Latin America During spring 2021, I signed an open letter addressed to the editors of the socialist journals Monthly Review and Jacobin complaining about their coverage of the 2021 election in Ecuador. The two hundred signers of the letter are all aligned with left projects and formations. Our complaint was focused on the journals' representation of the candidate of some Ecuadoran Indigenous social movements, Yaku Pérez, and his political party, Pachakutik. They portrayed him as a Trojan horse for the left's most bitter neoliberal enemies (Signatories 2021). The election came on the heels of the unpopular government of Lenín Moreno, the successor to the decade-long dominance of Rafael Correa of the Alianza País. Moreno had moved substantially to the right of Correa's left-wing socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal government. The election of Correa had been an achievement of the "pink tide" in Latin America, but over time that government's reliance on extractivist practices for income generation, and their severe crackdown on dissenting social protest movements, generated opposition among anti-extractivist Indigenous groups. The Indigenous movement and its political party, while far from politically or ideologically monolithic, generated alternative visions for left governing, including feminist and queer components and offering an eco-socialist conception of land and resource use along with visions of radically inclusive democracy. The first round of elections in February 2021 at first looked like it would result in a runoff between Correa's candidate, Andrés Arauz, and the Pachakutik candidate, Yaku Pérez. But the surprising result was a runoff between Arauz and the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso. The conflict surrounding the runoff on the left was fierce (Peralta 2021). Pérez charged electoral fraud, and Pachakutik advised their supporters to spoil their ballots rather than vote for either of the two remaining candidates. Pérez had himself been assaulted, arrested, and imprisoned for protest activity. The general criminalization of protest and the extension of extractivist policies by Correaists meant that an Arauz victory loomed as an existential threat to the existence of the Indigenous movement. There could be no support for a neoliberal Lasso government either. This was a strategic gambit, not an ideological choice. But understandably the Arauz forces considered this position a profound betrayal of the overall left project. Not only Correa supporters specifically, but sections of the international left saw the failure of Pérez and his allies to support Arauz against a neoliberal banker as evidence of hidden neoliberal sympathies. Thus the Trojan horse charge. [End Page 244] The point of the open letter was to push back against that charge...